提出首个考虑染色非高斯特性的联邦域泛化方法,提升病理图像跨机构分析的鲁棒性。
FedStain: Modeling Higher-Order Stain Statistics for Federated Domain Generalization in Computational Pathology

- 引入偏度与峰度等高阶染色统计量,在联邦学习中交换而非传输像素数据。
- 在Camelyon17和MvMidog-Fed上比现有方法最高提升3.9%准确率。
- 适合需要严格隐私保护的多中心医疗图像分析场景。
由于跨机构染色差异显著,遵守数据治理规范下的全切片图像(WSI)分析仍具挑战。域泛化(DG)可缓解此类差异,但通常需集中数据,与隐私法规冲突。联邦学习(FedL)提供去中心化方案;然而,现有方法几乎仅依赖低阶统计量,假设染色分布近似高斯。实际染色过程因生化扩散与扫描仪非线性常导致非对称、重尾的颜色分布。因此,当前方法无法建模主导真实染色变异的高阶非高斯特性。为此,我们提出FedStain,一种显式纳入偏度与峰度等高阶染色矩的染色感知联邦域泛化框架。这些统计量作为紧凑描述符在联邦优化中交换,无需传输像素级数据,既保障隐私又提升通信效率,使全局模型捕获低阶统计量遗漏的染色变异性。同时,采用对比式跨站点参数聚合策略,促进染色不变表示,不放宽数据约束。在Camelyon17和新构建的MvMidog-Fed基准上的实验表明,FedStain持续提升性能,相比最先进联邦学习、域泛化及联邦域泛化基线最高达+3.9%绝对准确率。据我们所知,FedStain是首个明确建模高阶染色统计特性的联邦域泛化方法,实现计算病理学中跨机构部署的稳健性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Robust whole-slide image (WSI) analysis under strict data-governance remains challenging due to substantial cross-institutional stain heterogeneity. Domain generalization (DG) mitigates these shifts but typically requires centralized data, conflicting with privacy regulations. Federated learning (FedL) provides a decentralized alternative; however, existing FedL and federated DG (FedDG) approaches rely almost exclusively on low-order statistics, assuming Gaussian-like stain distributions. In contrast, real-world staining processes often produce asymmetric, heavy-tailed color distributions due to biochemical diffusion and scanner nonlinearity. Consequently, current methods fail to model the higher-order, non-Gaussian characteristics dominating real-world stain variability. To address this, we propose FedStain, a stain-aware FedDG framework explicitly incorporating higher-order stain moments--skewness and kurtosis--as compact statistical descriptors exchanged during federated optimization. These descriptors require no pixel-level data transmission, preserving strict privacy and communication efficiency, while enabling the global model to capture stain variability missed by low-order statistics. FedStain also employs a contrastive, cross-site parameter aggregation strategy to promote stain-invariant representations without relaxing data constraints. Extensive experiments on Camelyon17 and our new MvMidog-Fed benchmark show FedStain yields consistent improvements, outperforming state-of-the-art FedL, DG, and FedDG baselines by up to +3.9% absolute accuracy. To our knowledge, FedStain is the first FedDG approach to explicitly model higher-order stain statistics, enabling robust cross-institutional deployment in computational pathology.
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