弱半监督下提升病理切片分类准确率,仅需少量标注数据
Weakly Semi-supervised Whole Slide Image Classification by Two-level Cross Consistency Supervision
- 设计双分支框架,通过两级一致性约束提升模型鲁棒性
- 在仅有少量标签切片时,分类性能超越现有方法
- 适合临床病理诊断中数据稀缺场景,实用性强
基于计算机的全切片图像(WSI)分类有望提升临床病理诊断的准确性和效率。通常将其建模为多实例学习(MIL)问题,其中每张WSI被视为一个“包”,从中提取的小块图像作为“实例”。然而,获取大量包的标签成本高昂且耗时,尤其在针对新分类任务使用已有WSI时,这使得多数现有方法难以应用。为此,本文提出一种更贴近临床实践的新问题设定——弱半监督全切片图像分类(WSWC),即少量包有标签,大量包无标签。由于该问题具有典型的MIL特性且无实例标签,与自然图像半监督分类问题不同,现有算法不适用。为此,本文提出简洁高效的CroCo框架,通过两级交叉一致性监督解决此问题。CroCo包含两个异构分类分支,分别进行实例和包级分类,训练中强制两分支在包级和实例级保持一致性。在四个数据集上的实验表明,当可用标注的WSI有限时,CroCo在包级和实例级分类性能均优于对比方法。据我们所知,本文首次提出并成功解决了WSWC问题。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Computer-aided Whole Slide Image (WSI) classification has the potential to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of clinical pathological diagnosis. It is commonly formulated as a Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) problem, where each WSI is treated as a bag and the small patches extracted from the WSI are considered instances within that bag. However, obtaining labels for a large number of bags is a costly and time-consuming process, particularly when utilizing existing WSIs for new classification tasks. This limitation renders most existing WSI classification methods ineffective. To address this issue, we propose a novel WSI classification problem setting, more aligned with clinical practice, termed Weakly Semi-supervised Whole slide image Classification (WSWC). In WSWC, a small number of bags are labeled, while a significant number of bags remain unlabeled. The MIL nature of the WSWC problem, coupled with the absence of patch labels, distinguishes it from typical semi-supervised image classification problems, making existing algorithms for natural images unsuitable for directly solving the WSWC problem. In this paper, we present a concise and efficient framework, named CroCo, to tackle the WSWC problem through two-level Cross Consistency supervision. CroCo comprises two heterogeneous classifier branches capable of performing both instance classification and bag classification. The fundamental idea is to establish cross-consistency supervision at both the bag-level and instance-level between the two branches during training. Extensive experiments conducted on four datasets demonstrate that CroCo achieves superior bag classification and instance classification performance compared to other comparative methods when limited WSIs with bag labels are available. To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents for the first time the WSWC problem and gives a successful resolution.
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