AI病理图像归一化会生成虚假特征,影响诊断准确性。
When normalization hallucinates: unseen risks in AI-powered whole slide image processing
- 提出新图像比对方法自动检测归一化中的幻觉内容
- 真实临床数据中模型幻觉发生率显著高于公开数据集
- 警示当前评估方式忽略幻觉风险,临床部署需更严格验证
全切片图像(WSI)归一化是计算病理学中关键的预处理步骤。随着深度学习的发展,模型通过训练样本逼近数据分布,常导致输出趋向平均值,可能掩盖具有诊断意义的特征。更严重的是,模型会引入看似真实但实际不存在于原始组织中的幻觉内容,对下游分析构成严重威胁。这些幻觉几乎无法通过肉眼识别,而现有评估方法往往忽视此问题。本文证明幻觉风险真实存在且被低估:尽管许多方法在公开数据集上表现良好,但在重新训练并评估真实临床数据时,幻觉出现频率令人担忧。为此,我们提出一种新型图像比对度量,可自动检测归一化输出中的幻觉。利用该度量系统评估多个知名归一化方法在真实数据上的表现,发现显著不一致与失败,传统指标未能捕捉。研究强调需要更鲁棒、可解释的归一化技术及更严格的临床验证协议。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Whole slide image (WSI) normalization remains a vital preprocessing step in computational pathology. Increasingly driven by deep learning, these models learn to approximate data distributions from training examples. This often results in outputs that gravitate toward the average, potentially masking diagnostically important features. More critically, they can introduce hallucinated content, artifacts that appear realistic but are not present in the original tissue, posing a serious threat to downstream analysis. These hallucinations are nearly impossible to detect visually, and current evaluation practices often overlook them. In this work, we demonstrate that the risk of hallucinations is real and underappreciated. While many methods perform adequately on public datasets, we observe a concerning frequency of hallucinations when these same models are retrained and evaluated on real-world clinical data. To address this, we propose a novel image comparison measure designed to automatically detect hallucinations in normalized outputs. Using this measure, we systematically evaluate several well-cited normalization methods retrained on real-world data, revealing significant inconsistencies and failures that are not captured by conventional metrics. Our findings underscore the need for more robust, interpretable normalization techniques and stricter validation protocols in clinical deployment.
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