用多模型融合提升病理切片细胞计数精度,尤其擅长重叠细胞。
Rank-Aware Agglomeration of Foundation Models for Immunohistochemistry Image Cell Counting
- 基于排名选择强模型知识,动态组合不同教师模型优势。
- 在12种生物标志物上超越现有方法,与病理科医生判断高度一致。
- 适合需要精准细胞计数的癌症研究和病理分析人员。
免疫组化(IHC)图像中的准确细胞计数对蛋白表达量化和癌症诊断至关重要。然而,染色重叠、生物标志物染色差异及细胞形态多样,使该任务极具挑战性。基于回归的计数方法虽能更好处理重叠细胞,但极少支持端到端多类别计数,且基础模型在此领域的潜力尚未充分挖掘。为此,我们提出一种秩感知聚合框架,通过选择性蒸馏多个强大基础模型的知识,利用其互补表征应对IHC异质性,构建出高效紧凑的学生模型CountIHC。不同于以往不区分教师或依赖特征相似性的聚合策略,我们设计了秩感知教师选择(RATS)机制,通过全局到局部的图像块排名评估各教师的内在计数能力,并实现样本级教师选择。针对多类别计数,引入微调阶段,将任务重构为视觉-语言对齐:从结构化文本提示中提取离散语义锚点,同时编码类别与数量信息,引导特定类别的密度图回归,显著提升重叠细胞计数性能。大量实验表明,CountIHC在12个IHC生物标志物和5种组织类型上均优于当前最优方法,且与病理学家评估结果高度一致。其在H&E染色数据上的有效性也证明了方法的可扩展性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Accurate cell counting in immunohistochemistry (IHC) images is critical for quantifying protein expression and aiding cancer diagnosis. However, the task remains challenging due to the chromogen overlap, variable biomarker staining, and diverse cellular morphologies. Regression-based counting methods offer advantages over detection-based ones in handling overlapped cells, yet rarely support end-to-end multi-class counting. Moreover, the potential of foundation models remains largely underexplored in this paradigm. To address these limitations, we propose a rank-aware agglomeration framework that selectively distills knowledge from multiple strong foundation models, leveraging their complementary representations to handle IHC heterogeneity and obtain a compact yet effective student model, CountIHC. Unlike prior task-agnostic agglomeration strategies that either treat all teachers equally or rely on feature similarity, we design a Rank-Aware Teacher Selecting (RATS) strategy that models global-to-local patch rankings to assess each teacher's inherent counting capacity and enable sample-wise teacher selection. For multi-class cell counting, we introduce a fine-tuning stage that reformulates the task as vision-language alignment. Discrete semantic anchors derived from structured text prompts encode both category and quantity information, guiding the regression of class-specific density maps and improving counting for overlapping cells. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CountIHC surpasses state-of-the-art methods across 12 IHC biomarkers and 5 tissue types, while exhibiting high agreement with pathologists' assessments. Its effectiveness on H&E-stained data further confirms the scalability of the proposed method.
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