用向量量化压缩病理切片特征,提升分析精度同时大幅降低存储开销。
PathVQ: Reforming Computational Pathology Foundation Model for Whole Slide Image Analysis via Vector Quantization
- 通过向量量化将切片特征压缩64倍,仅用16个离散索引表示
- 多尺度量化提升重建质量,实现无需标注的自监督预训练
- 适合需要高精度空间信息的癌症诊断与病理图像分析任务
计算病理学和全切片图像(WSI)分析在癌症诊断与预后中至关重要。然而,WSI的超高清分辨率带来巨大建模挑战。现有病理基础模型多依赖瓦片ViT的[CLS]标记作为整张切片输入(瓦片大小为224x224像素,块为16x16像素),忽略了关键的空间块级信息,限制了下游任务表现。我们发现利用所有空间块特征有助于提升性能,但会带来近200倍更高的存储与训练成本(如ViT$_{224}$中含196个块)。为此,我们提出基于向量量化(VQ)的特征蒸馏方法,通过离散索引与解码器高效压缩块特征,将维度从1024降至16,实现64倍压缩率且保持高重建保真度。进一步采用多尺度向量量化(MSVQ)策略,不仅增强重构效果,还提供自监督学习(SSL)信号,实现无缝的切片级预训练目标。基于量化后的块特征与瓷砖级监督信号,构建渐进式卷积模块与切片级SSL,提取富含空间信息的表征以支持下游任务。在多个数据集上的大量实验表明,该方法在全切片图像分析中达到领先水平。代码即将发布。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Computational pathology and whole-slide image (WSI) analysis are pivotal in cancer diagnosis and prognosis. However, the ultra-high resolution of WSIs presents significant modeling challenges. Recent advancements in pathology foundation models have improved performance, yet most approaches rely on [CLS] token representation of tile ViT as slide-level inputs (16x16 pixels is refereed as patch and 224x224 pixels as tile). This discards critical spatial details from patch tokens, limiting downstream WSI analysis tasks. We find that leveraging all spatial patch tokens benefits WSI analysis but incurs nearly 200x higher storage and training costs (e.g., 196 tokens in ViT$_{224}$). To address this, we introduce vector quantized (VQ) distillation on patch feature, which efficiently compresses spatial patch tokens using discrete indices and a decoder. Our method reduces token dimensionality from 1024 to 16, achieving a 64x compression rate while preserving reconstruction fidelity. Furthermore, we employ a multi-scale VQ (MSVQ) strategy, which not only enhances VQ reconstruction performance but also serves as a Self-supervised Learning (SSL) supervision for a seamless slide-level pretraining objective. Built upon the quantized patch features and supervision targets of tile via MSVQ, we develop a progressive convolutional module and slide-level SSL to extract representations with rich spatial-information for downstream WSI tasks. Extensive evaluations on multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving state-of-the-art performance in WSI analysis. Code will be available soon.
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