arXiv:2602.15783cs.CV2026-02

用图变压器分析皮肤癌组织,提升细胞分类准确率。

Context-aware Skin Cancer Epithelial Cell Classification with Scalable Graph Transformers

  • 构建全切片细胞图,用图变压器捕捉组织上下文信息。
  • 在相似形态细胞分类任务中,准确率达85.2%,优于传统方法。
  • 适合病理图像分析、医疗AI研究者参考。

癌症患者的全切片图像(WSIs)包含丰富的诊断与治疗监测信息。为实现自动化分析,现有深度学习方法多基于卷积神经网络和视觉变压器,但受限于切片规模与复杂细胞结构,常采用基于块的表示,丢失组织级上下文。本文提出在全切片细胞图上使用可扩展图变压器进行分类。在皮肤鳞状细胞癌(cSCC)中区分健康与肿瘤上皮细胞的任务上,该方法表现优异:单张切片验证中,SGFormer与DIFFormer的平衡准确率分别为85.2±1.5与85.1±2.5,优于最佳图像基方法(81.2±3.0)。通过多种节点特征组合分析,发现结合形态、纹理特征及非上皮细胞类别信息最具判别力。进一步在多患者切片上训练,从每张图像提取四个2560×2560像素块转为图结构,此时DIFFormer达83.6±1.9,显著高于当前最优图像模型CellViT256的78.1±0.5。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Whole-slide images (WSIs) from cancer patients contain rich information that can be used for medical diagnosis or to follow treatment progress. To automate their analysis, numerous deep learning methods based on convolutional neural networks and Vision Transformers have been developed and have achieved strong performance in segmentation and classification tasks. However, due to the large size and complex cellular organization of WSIs, these models rely on patch-based representations, losing vital tissue-level context. We propose using scalable Graph Transformers on a full-WSI cell graph for classification. We evaluate this methodology on a challenging task: the classification of healthy versus tumor epithelial cells in cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC), where both cell types exhibit very similar morphologies and are therefore difficult to differentiate for image-based approaches. We first compared image-based and graph-based methods on a single WSI. Graph Transformer models SGFormer and DIFFormer achieved balanced accuracies of $85.2 \pm 1.5$ ($\pm$ standard error) and $85.1 \pm 2.5$ in 3-fold cross-validation, respectively, whereas the best image-based method reached $81.2 \pm 3.0$. By evaluating several node feature configurations, we found that the most informative representation combined morphological and texture features as well as the cell classes of non-epithelial cells, highlighting the importance of the surrounding cellular context. We then extended our work to train on several WSIs from several patients. To address the computational constraints of image-based models, we extracted four $2560 \times 2560$ pixel patches from each image and converted them into graphs. In this setting, DIFFormer achieved a balanced accuracy of $83.6 \pm 1.9$ (3-fold cross-validation), while the state-of-the-art image-based model CellViT256 reached $78.1 \pm 0.5$.

病理图像图神经网络皮肤癌细胞分类

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