arXiv:2410.14195cs.CV2024-10NeurIPS被引 26

提出新型混合注意力机制,高效处理长序列病理切片图像分析。

Rethinking Transformer for Long Contextual Histopathology Whole Slide Image Analysis

  • 设计局部注意力掩码,聚焦局部交互提升长序列建模能力
  • 将计算复杂度从二次降低为线性,实现高效推理
  • 适合需要高精度与低延迟的病理图像分析场景

病理全切片图像(WSI)分析是临床癌症诊断的金标准。以往方法多采用多实例学习,仅依赖切片级标签进行预测,传统注意力机制缺乏成对交互,难以建模上下文信息。近期自注意力模型虽有所改进,但如HIPT和TransMIL通过区域切分或近似自注意力来缓解长序列计算负担,导致关键信息丢失,且绝对位置编码在形状多变的WSI中难以捕捉长程依赖。本文首先分析长序列注意力矩阵的低秩特性如何限制表示能力,发现通过局部注意力掩码聚焦局部交互可提升其秩。该掩码与Transformer底层注意力模式一致,可在分块注意力计算中实现,将二次复杂度降至线性,仅需小局部带宽。基于此,提出局部-全局混合Transformer,用于长上下文建模与计算加速。所提方法LongMIL在多个WSI任务上验证了优越性,代码将在github.com/invoker-LL/Long-MIL发布。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Histopathology Whole Slide Image (WSI) analysis serves as the gold standard for clinical cancer diagnosis in the daily routines of doctors. To develop computer-aided diagnosis model for WSIs, previous methods typically employ Multi-Instance Learning to enable slide-level prediction given only slide-level labels. Among these models, vanilla attention mechanisms without pairwise interactions have traditionally been employed but are unable to model contextual information. More recently, self-attention models have been utilized to address this issue. To alleviate the computational complexity of long sequences in large WSIs, methods like HIPT use region-slicing, and TransMIL employs approximation of full self-attention. Both approaches suffer from suboptimal performance due to the loss of key information. Moreover, their use of absolute positional embedding struggles to effectively handle long contextual dependencies in shape-varying WSIs. In this paper, we first analyze how the low-rank nature of the long-sequence attention matrix constrains the representation ability of WSI modelling. Then, we demonstrate that the rank of attention matrix can be improved by focusing on local interactions via a local attention mask. Our analysis shows that the local mask aligns with the attention patterns in the lower layers of the Transformer. Furthermore, the local attention mask can be implemented during chunked attention calculation, reducing the quadratic computational complexity to linear with a small local bandwidth. Building on this, we propose a local-global hybrid Transformer for both computational acceleration and local-global information interactions modelling. Our method, Long-contextual MIL (LongMIL), is evaluated through extensive experiments on various WSI tasks to validate its superiority. Our code will be available at github.com/invoker-LL/Long-MIL.

病理图像Transformer注意力机制长序列建模

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