利用组织切片的相邻区域结构,提升无标注病理图像的表示学习效果。
Leveraging Spatial Context for Positive Pair Sampling in Histopathology Image Representation Learning
- 基于空间邻近切片块的形态一致性,构建更有效的正样本对。
- 在4个数据集上实现5%~10%的分类准确率提升。
- 适用于缺乏标注的病理图像预训练,适合医学影像研究者。
深度学习在全切片图像(WSIs)的癌症分类中展现出巨大潜力,但依赖大量专家标注常限制其应用。无标注方法如多实例学习(MIL)和自监督学习(SSL)成为替代方案。然而,传统SSL依赖合成数据增强,难以捕捉病理图像的关键空间结构。本文提出一种基于空间上下文的正样本采样策略,利用WSI中空间相邻切片块的形态一致性来增强自监督学习。该方法模块化,兼容Barlow Twins、BYOL、VICReg和DINOv2等主流联合嵌入框架。在滑片级分类(采用MIL)和切片级线性探测上评估,四个数据集均显示稳定性能提升,准确率提高5%至10%。结果表明,空间上下文对计算病理表示学习至关重要,为标注稀缺场景下的模型预训练提供了生物学意义明确的改进。代码已公开于https://anonymous.4open.science/r/contextual-pairs-E72F/。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Deep learning has shown strong potential in cancer classification from whole-slide images (WSIs), but the need for extensive expert annotations often limits its success. Annotation-free approaches, such as multiple instance learning (MIL) and self-supervised learning (SSL), have emerged as promising alternatives to traditional annotation-based methods. However, conventional SSL methods typically rely on synthetic data augmentations, which may fail to capture the spatial structure critical to histopathology. In this work, we propose a spatial context-driven positive pair sampling strategy that enhances SSL by leveraging the morphological coherence of spatially adjacent patches within WSIs. Our method is modular and compatible with established joint embedding SSL frameworks, including Barlow Twins, BYOL, VICReg, and DINOv2. We evaluate its effectiveness on both slide-level classification using MIL and patch-level linear probing. Experiments across four datasets demonstrate consistent performance improvements, with accuracy gains of 5\% to 10\% compared to standard augmentation-based sampling. These findings highlight the value of spatial context in improving representation learning for computational pathology and provide a biologically meaningful enhancement for pretraining models in annotation-limited settings. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/contextual-pairs-E72F/.
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