用无监督方法在极罕见癌细胞中精准定位,效果超越传统标注依赖模型。
Needle in a Haystack: One-Class Representation Learning for Detecting Rare Malignant Cells in Computational Cytology
- 仅用正常细胞样本训练,通过学习健康形态来识别异常细胞。
- 在恶性细胞占比≤1%时仍保持领先性能,部分场景优于全监督模型。
- 适合标注稀缺的病理图像分析,尤其适用于低检出率癌症筛查。
在计算细胞学中,全切片图像上检测恶性细胞极具挑战,因癌细胞形态多样且极其稀少,背景为大量正常细胞。准确检测这些极罕见癌细胞受限于严重的类别不平衡和标注数据有限。传统弱监督方法(如多实例学习)在实例级泛化能力差,尤其当恶性细胞比例(见证率)极低时。本研究探索使用一类表示学习技术应对低见证率场景。这些方法仅在无恶性细胞的切片块上训练,无需实例级标注。具体评估了两种一类分类方法DSVDD和DROC,与FS-SIL、WS-SIL及近期ItS2CLR方法对比。一类方法学习正常性的紧凑表示,并在测试时检测偏离。在公开骨髓细胞形态数据集(TCIA)和自研口腔癌细胞数据集上的实验表明,DSVDD在实例级异常排序任务中达到当前最优表现,尤其在超低见证率(≤1%)条件下;某些情况下甚至超过全监督学习,后者通常不适用于全切片细胞学,因难以实现逐实例标注。DROC亦在极端稀有情形下表现优异,得益于分布增强的对比学习。结果表明,一类表示学习是极端稀有情况下的稳健且可解释的更优选择。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
In computational cytology, detecting malignancy on whole-slide images is difficult because malignant cells are morphologically diverse yet vanishingly rare amid a vast background of normal cells. Accurate detection of these extremely rare malignant cells remains challenging due to large class imbalance and limited annotations. Conventional weakly supervised approaches, such as multiple instance learning (MIL), often fail to generalize at the instance level, especially when the fraction of malignant cells (witness rate) is exceedingly low. In this study, we explore the use of one-class representation learning techniques for detecting malignant cells in low-witness-rate scenarios. These methods are trained exclusively on slide-negative patches, without requiring any instance-level supervision. Specifically, we evaluate two OCC approaches, DSVDD and DROC, and compare them with FS-SIL, WS-SIL, and the recent ItS2CLR method. The one-class methods learn compact representations of normality and detect deviations at test time. Experiments on a publicly available bone marrow cytomorphology dataset (TCIA) and an in-house oral cancer cytology dataset show that DSVDD achieves state-of-the-art performance in instance-level abnormality ranking, particularly in ultra-low witness-rate regimes ($\leq 1\%$) and, in some cases, even outperforming fully supervised learning, which is typically not a practical option in whole-slide cytology due to the infeasibility of exhaustive instance-level annotations. DROC is also competitive under extreme rarity, benefiting from distribution-augmented contrastive learning. These findings highlight one-class representation learning as a robust and interpretable superior choice to MIL for malignant cell detection under extreme rarity.
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