用极低标注成本实现病理图像分类,性能接近全监督方法。
FAST: A Dual-tier Few-Shot Learning Paradigm for Whole Slide Image Classification

- 分两层处理:用少量切片和极少数样本标注,构建知识缓存与先验提示双分支
- 仅需0.22%标注量,分类准确率接近全监督模型
- 适合医疗图像少样本学习,尤其标注成本高的病理分析场景
深度学习在临床实践中应用的全视野数字病理图像(WSI)分类面临精细标注成本高、数据稀缺的问题。现有少样本WSI分类方法仅依赖少量精细标签或弱监督切片标签训练,难以充分挖掘可用的WSI信息,严重制约分类性能。为此,本文提出一种新颖高效的双层少样本学习范式FAST,包含双层级标注策略与双分支分类框架。首先,在避免昂贵细粒度标注的前提下,仅收集少量切片并标注极少数图像块;其次,利用所有图像块及已有标签构建缓存分支,通过知识检索学习未标注块的标签;同时构建包含可学习提示向量的先验分支,结合视觉-语言模型文本编码器进行图像块分类。最终融合双分支结果完成WSI分类。在二分类与多分类数据集上的大量实验表明,FAST显著优于现有少样本方法,仅需0.22%的标注成本即可达到全监督方法的性能。所有代码与模型将公开于https://github.com/fukexue/FAST。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The expensive fine-grained annotation and data scarcity have become the primary obstacles for the widespread adoption of deep learning-based Whole Slide Images (WSI) classification algorithms in clinical practice. Unlike few-shot learning methods in natural images that can leverage the labels of each image, existing few-shot WSI classification methods only utilize a small number of fine-grained labels or weakly supervised slide labels for training in order to avoid expensive fine-grained annotation. They lack sufficient mining of available WSIs, severely limiting WSI classification performance. To address the above issues, we propose a novel and efficient dual-tier few-shot learning paradigm for WSI classification, named FAST. FAST consists of a dual-level annotation strategy and a dual-branch classification framework. Firstly, to avoid expensive fine-grained annotation, we collect a very small number of WSIs at the slide level, and annotate an extremely small number of patches. Then, to fully mining the available WSIs, we use all the patches and available patch labels to build a cache branch, which utilizes the labeled patches to learn the labels of unlabeled patches and through knowledge retrieval for patch classification. In addition to the cache branch, we also construct a prior branch that includes learnable prompt vectors, using the text encoder of visual-language models for patch classification. Finally, we integrate the results from both branches to achieve WSI classification. Extensive experiments on binary and multi-class datasets demonstrate that our proposed method significantly surpasses existing few-shot classification methods and approaches the accuracy of fully supervised methods with only 0.22$\%$ annotation costs. All codes and models will be publicly available on https://github.com/fukexue/FAST.
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