用简单映射替代复杂学习,让病理模型更高效地分析全切片图像。
Can We Simplify Slide-level Fine-tuning of Pathology Foundation Models?
- 用均值池化加MLP的简单映射,替代传统复杂MIL方法。
- 在泛癌分类任务中比主流MIL方法高3.52%准确率。
- 适合小样本和跨数据集迁移,对临床应用更友好。
计算病理学中基础模型的出现改变了组织切片图像分析,全切片成像(WSI)诊断是核心应用。传统上,基于多实例学习(MIL)的弱监督微调是适配基础模型到WSI的主要方法。本文提出关键实验发现:一种结合均值池化与多层感知机的简单非线性映射策略(SiMLP),无需复杂MIL学习即可有效将补丁级基础模型适配至切片级任务。在多种下游任务上的大量实验表明,SiMLP性能优于现有最先进方法。例如,在大规模泛癌分类任务中,其准确率比主流MIL方法高出3.52%。此外,SiMLP在少样本分类中表现出强学习能力,且在数十万张切片预训练的切片级基础模型对比下仍具竞争力。最后,其在肺癌亚型分类中展现出显著鲁棒性和可迁移性。总体而言,本研究挑战了传统的基于MIL的微调范式,证明仅靠任务无关表示策略即可有效适配基础模型进行WSI分析。这些发现为数字病理学未来研究提供了独特而有意义的视角,推动更高效、普适的方法发展。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The emergence of foundation models in computational pathology has transformed histopathological image analysis, with whole slide imaging (WSI) diagnosis being a core application. Traditionally, weakly supervised fine-tuning via multiple instance learning (MIL) has been the primary method for adapting foundation models to WSIs. However, in this work we present a key experimental finding: a simple nonlinear mapping strategy combining mean pooling and a multilayer perceptron, called SiMLP, can effectively adapt patch-level foundation models to slide-level tasks without complex MIL-based learning. Through extensive experiments across diverse downstream tasks, we demonstrate the superior performance of SiMLP with state-of-the-art methods. For instance, on a large-scale pan-cancer classification task, SiMLP surpasses popular MIL-based methods by 3.52%. Furthermore, SiMLP shows strong learning ability in few-shot classification and remaining highly competitive with slide-level foundation models pretrained on tens of thousands of slides. Finally, SiMLP exhibits remarkable robustness and transferability in lung cancer subtyping. Overall, our findings challenge the conventional MIL-based fine-tuning paradigm, demonstrating that a task-agnostic representation strategy alone can effectively adapt foundation models to WSI analysis. These insights offer a unique and meaningful perspective for future research in digital pathology, paving the way for more efficient and broadly applicable methodologies.
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