让病理特征可解释,编辑时自动调整相关属性避免生成假象。
Explainable Pathomics Feature Visualization via Correlation-aware Conditional Feature Editing
- 用变分自编码器学习特征解耦空间,确保编辑时保持生物合理性。
- 在真实细胞分布范围内进行特征编辑,生成图像结构更一致。
- 适合需要可解释病理分析的医生和研究人员使用。
病理组学(Pathomics)提供超越黑箱深度学习的定量特征,有助于实现可重复、可解释的生物标志物。然而,许多衍生特征(如“二阶矩”)在不同临床背景下仍难解读,限制了实际应用。条件扩散模型虽有解释潜力,但通常假设特征独立——这一假设在内在相关性普遍存在的病理特征中被违反。仅修改一个特征而固定其他特征会导致模型偏离生物流形,产生不真实的伪影。为此,我们提出一种流形感知扩散(MAD)框架,实现可控且生物合理的细胞核编辑。与现有方法不同,该方法在变分自编码器(VAE)学习的解耦潜在空间中正则化特征轨迹,确保操纵目标特征时自动调整相关属性,以维持真实细胞的分布特性。这些优化后的特征引导条件扩散模型生成高保真图像。实验表明,该方法能在编辑路径组学特征时有效导航其流形,相比基线方法在条件特征编辑上表现更优,同时保持结构一致性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Pathomics is a recent approach that offers rich quantitative features beyond what black-box deep learning can provide, supporting more reproducible and explainable biomarkers in digital pathology. However, many derived features (e.g., "second-order moment") remain difficult to interpret, especially across different clinical contexts, which limits their practical adoption. Conditional diffusion models show promise for explainability through feature editing, but they typically assume feature independence**--**an assumption violated by intrinsically correlated pathomics features. Consequently, editing one feature while fixing others can push the model off the biological manifold and produce unrealistic artifacts. To address this, we propose a Manifold-Aware Diffusion (MAD) framework for controllable and biologically plausible cell nuclei editing. Unlike existing approaches, our method regularizes feature trajectories within a disentangled latent space learned by a variational auto-encoder (VAE). This ensures that manipulating a target feature automatically adjusts correlated attributes to remain within the learned distribution of real cells. These optimized features then guide a conditional diffusion model to synthesize high-fidelity images. Experiments demonstrate that our approach is able to navigate the manifold of pathomics features when editing those features. The proposed method outperforms baseline methods in conditional feature editing while preserving structural coherence.
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