arXiv:2605.18522cs.CVcs.AI2026-05

仅用颜色特征就能准确区分癌症良恶性,效果堪比复杂模型。

Beyond Morphology: Quantifying the Diagnostic Power of Color Features in Cancer Classification

论文配图:Beyond Morphology: Quantifying the Diagnostic Power of Color Features in Cancer Classification
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 剥离形态信息,仅用颜色统计量做分类
  • 在10种设置下最高达89%准确率
  • 适合做轻量级初筛,降低算力负担

在组织病理学中,人类专家主要依赖颜色增强组织结构对比,而机器视觉模型则将颜色视为原始统计信息。这一差异引发根本问题:仅凭像素强度,不依赖结构和形态线索,能否支持癌症分类?为此,我们系统评估了全局颜色特征的独立判别能力,刻意排除所有形态信息。具体提取统计颜色矩及离散化的RGB和HSV颜色直方图,使用经典机器学习分类器在十种不同实验设置下评估性能。结果表明,仅颜色特征在二分类任务(如良性与恶性)中即可达到优异表现,准确率最高达89%。该表现可能归因于恶性病变相关的整体色度偏移。重要的是,这些简单颜色表示显著优于随机基线,表明原始颜色分布编码了非随机且具有诊断意义的信号。因此,本研究建议,简单、计算高效的颜色特征可作为有效初筛工具。通过识别具有强恶性色度指示的样本,这类轻量模型可充当首道筛选系统,减轻复杂深度学习架构的计算压力。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

In histopathology, human experts primarily rely on color as a means of enhancing contrast to interpret tissue morphology, whereas machine vision models process color as raw statistical information. This distinction raises a fundamental question: to what extent can pixel intensity alone, independent of structural and morphological cues, support cancer classification? To address this question, we systematically evaluated the standalone discriminative power of global color features while deliberately excluding all morphological information. Specifically, we extracted statistical color moments and discretized RGB and HSV color histograms, and assessed their performance across ten diverse experimental settings using classical machine learning classifiers. Our results demonstrate that color features alone can achieve strong performance in binary diagnostic tasks (e.g., benign versus malignant), with classification accuracies reaching up to 89%. This performance is likely attributable to global chromatic shifts associated with malignancy. Importantly, these simple color-based representations consistently outperformed random baselines by a substantial margin, indicating that raw color distributions encode a non-random and diagnostically relevant signal for cancer detection. Consequently, this study suggests that simple, computationally efficient color features can serve as an effective pre-screening tool. By identifying samples with strong chromatic indicators of malignancy, these lightweight models could function as a first-pass triage system, reducing the computational burden on complex deep learning architectures.

癌症分类颜色特征轻量模型初筛系统

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