[HTML][HTML] Cross-scale multi-instance learning for pathological image diagnosis

R Deng, C Cui, LW Remedios, S Bao, RM Womick… - Medical image …, 2024 - Elsevier
R Deng, C Cui, LW Remedios, S Bao, RM Womick, S Chiron, J Li, JT Roland, KS Lau, Q Liu
Medical image analysis, 2024Elsevier
Analyzing high resolution whole slide images (WSIs) with regard to information across
multiple scales poses a significant challenge in digital pathology. Multi-instance learning
(MIL) is a common solution for working with high resolution images by classifying bags of
objects (ie sets of smaller image patches). However, such processing is typically performed
at a single scale (eg, 20× magnification) of WSIs, disregarding the vital inter-scale
information that is key to diagnoses by human pathologists. In this study, we propose a novel …
Analyzing high resolution whole slide images (WSIs) with regard to information across multiple scales poses a significant challenge in digital pathology. Multi-instance learning (MIL) is a common solution for working with high resolution images by classifying bags of objects (ie sets of smaller image patches). However, such processing is typically performed at a single scale (eg, 20× magnification) of WSIs, disregarding the vital inter-scale information that is key to diagnoses by human pathologists. In this study, we propose a novel cross-scale MIL algorithm to explicitly aggregate inter-scale relationships into a single MIL network for pathological image diagnosis. The contribution of this paper is three-fold:(1) A novel cross-scale MIL (CS-MIL) algorithm that integrates the multi-scale information and the inter-scale relationships is proposed;(2) A toy dataset with scale-specific morphological features is created and released to examine and visualize differential cross-scale attention;(3) Superior performance on both in-house and public datasets is demonstrated by our simple cross-scale MIL strategy. The official implementation is publicly available at https://github. com/hrlblab/CS-MIL.
Elsevier