arXiv:2509.00311cs.CV2025-09被引 1

通过显式建模细胞形态,提升病理图像分类对域偏移的鲁棒性。

MorphGen: Morphology-Guided Representation Learning for Robust Single-Domain Generalization in Histopathological Cancer Classification

  • 融合图像、增强数据与核分割掩码,在对比学习中引导关注形态学特征。
  • 在多个数据集上达到92.1%~95.3%准确率,显著优于基线方法。
  • 适合关注数字病理诊断鲁棒性的研究者与临床应用开发者。

计算病理中的域泛化受全切片图像(WSI)异质性影响,源于不同机构间组织制备、染色及成像条件的差异。与机器学习系统不同,病理科医生依赖于跨域一致的形态学线索,如核异型性(增大、轮廓不规则、深染、染色质纹理、空间紊乱)、结构异型性(异常架构与腺体形成)及整体形态异型性。受此启发,我们提出假设:显式建模生物上稳健的核形态与空间组织,可使癌症表征对域偏移具有韧性。为此,我们提出MorphGen(形态引导泛化),将组织病理图像、增强数据与核分割掩码集成至监督对比学习框架中。通过对齐图像与核掩码的潜在表示,MorphGen优先关注核异型性、形态异型性与空间组织等诊断特征,而非染色伪影与域特定特征。为增强分布外鲁棒性,引入随机权重平均(SWA),引导优化趋向更平坦的极小值。注意力图分析显示,MorphGen主要依赖肿瘤或正常区域内的核形态、细胞组成与空间细胞组织进行分类。最终,所学表征在图像退化(如染色伪影)与对抗攻击下均表现出强韧性,不仅实现分布外泛化,还缓解了当前深度学习系统在数字病理中的关键脆弱性。代码、数据集与训练模型见:https://github.com/hikmatkhan/MorphGen。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Domain generalization in computational histopathology is hindered by heterogeneity in whole slide images (WSIs), caused by variations in tissue preparation, staining, and imaging conditions across institutions. Unlike machine learning systems, pathologists rely on domain-invariant morphological cues such as nuclear atypia (enlargement, irregular contours, hyperchromasia, chromatin texture, spatial disorganization), structural atypia (abnormal architecture and gland formation), and overall morphological atypia that remain diagnostic across diverse settings. Motivated by this, we hypothesize that explicitly modeling biologically robust nuclear morphology and spatial organization will enable the learning of cancer representations that are resilient to domain shifts. We propose MorphGen (Morphology-Guided Generalization), a method that integrates histopathology images, augmentations, and nuclear segmentation masks within a supervised contrastive learning framework. By aligning latent representations of images and nuclear masks, MorphGen prioritizes diagnostic features such as nuclear and morphological atypia and spatial organization over staining artifacts and domain-specific features. To further enhance out-of-distribution robustness, we incorporate stochastic weight averaging (SWA), steering optimization toward flatter minima. Attention map analyses revealed that MorphGen primarily relies on nuclear morphology, cellular composition, and spatial cell organization within tumors or normal regions for final classification. Finally, we demonstrate resilience of the learned representations to image corruptions (such as staining artifacts) and adversarial attacks, showcasing not only OOD generalization but also addressing critical vulnerabilities in current deep learning systems for digital pathology. Code, datasets, and trained models are available at: https://github.com/hikmatkhan/MorphGen

病理图像域泛化形态学对比学习

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