arXiv:2503.11846eess.IVcs.AI2025-03被引 2

用生物结构图表示病理切片,实现可解释的癌症诊断。

A Graph-Based Framework for Interpretable Whole Slide Image Analysis

  • 将切片转为尊重组织边界的图结构,节点基于自然区域而非网格划分。
  • 自适应图粗化保留关键区域细节,参数量少于1/13、数据需求低300倍。
  • 支持特征归因解释,适合临床医生与研究人员验证模型决策。

全切片图像(WSI)的组织病理学分析对癌症诊断至关重要,但耗时且依赖专家。现有深度学习方法多采用碎片化补丁策略,忽略生物边界,预测结果不可解释。本文提出一种新框架,将千兆像素级WSI转化为生物启发的图表示,天然具备可解释性。通过学习嵌入引导的自适应图粗化技术,高效合并同质区域,同时保留异质区域的关键信息。每个节点融合紧凑的临床先验特征,再由图注意力网络完成诊断。在复杂的癌症分期与生存预测任务中表现优异,资源效率显著:参数量优于大型基础模型13倍以上,数据需求降低300倍,且提供完整特征归因。代码已公开:https://github.com/HistoGraph31/pix2pathology。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

The histopathological analysis of whole-slide images (WSIs) is fundamental to cancer diagnosis but is a time-consuming and expert-driven process. While deep learning methods show promising results, dominant patch-based methods artificially fragment tissue, ignore biological boundaries, and produce black-box predictions. We overcome these limitations with a novel framework that transforms gigapixel WSIs into biologically-informed graph representations and is interpretable by design. Our approach builds graph nodes from tissue regions that respect natural structures, not arbitrary grids. We introduce an adaptive graph coarsening technique, guided by learned embeddings, to efficiently merge homogeneous regions while preserving diagnostically critical details in heterogeneous areas. Each node is enriched with a compact, interpretable feature set capturing clinically-motivated priors. A graph attention network then performs diagnosis on this compact representation. We demonstrate strong performance on challenging cancer staging and survival prediction tasks. Crucially, our resource-efficient model ($>$13x fewer parameters and $>$300x less data) achieves results competitive with a massive foundation model, while offering full interpretability through feature attribution. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/HistoGraph31/pix2pathology.

病理分析图神经网络可解释性医学影像

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