用低分辨率切片+高分辨率知识蒸馏,提升病理切片分析效率与精度
LRMIL: Efficient Low-Resolution Multiple Instance Learning via High-Resolution Knowledge Distillation for Whole Slide Image Classification

- 通过跨分辨率蒸馏,让低分辨率特征学习高分辨率细节
- 在多个病理数据集上超越现有方法,推理速度显著加快
- 适合临床部署,兼顾精度与计算效率
多实例学习(MIL)已成为数字病理学中全切片图像(WSI)分析的标准范式,可在无需密集标注的情况下实现切片级预测。现有MIL方法通常依赖大量高分辨率图像块的提取与编码,但在真实临床场景中存在两大问题:难以捕捉低倍率下的全局视觉线索,且因每张切片包含海量高分辨率块而带来巨大计算开销。为此,我们提出一种高效的低分辨率多实例学习(LRMIL)框架,通过高分辨率知识蒸馏将信息迁移至低分辨率表示。LRMIL采用两阶段蒸馏策略:首先进行块级跨分辨率蒸馏,对齐低分辨率块嵌入与高分辨率表征;其次进行切片级知识蒸馏,在切片级监督和教师指导双重作用下训练低分辨率学生模型。推理时仅使用低分辨率块,大幅降低数据预处理与计算成本。在多个WSI基准测试上的实验表明,LRMIL持续优于当前最优MIL方法,同时实现更高效的推理。结果证明,LRMIL是临床病理学中WSI分析的一种实用且可扩展的解决方案。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Multiple instance learning (MIL) has become a standard paradigm for whole slide image (WSI) analysis in digital pathology, as it enables slide-level prediction without dense annotations. Existing MIL methods typically rely on exhaustive extraction and encoding of high-resolution patches. However, this practice suffers from two critical limitations in real-world clinical settings: it struggles to capture global visual cues at lower magnifications, and incurs substantial computational overhead due to the massive number of high-resolution patches per slide. To address these limitations, we propose an efficient low-resolution multiple instance learning (LRMIL) framework that transfers high-resolution knowledge to low-resolution representations. LRMIL adopts a two-stage distillation strategy. First, patch-level cross-resolution distillation aligns low-resolution patch embeddings with high-resolution representations. Second, slide-level knowledge distillation trains a low-resolution student MIL model under both slide-level supervision and teacher guidance. At inference time, LRMIL operates exclusively on low-resolution patches, substantially reducing data preprocessing and computational cost. Extensive experiments on multiple WSI benchmarks demonstrate that LRMIL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art MIL methods while achieving more efficient inference. These results highlight LRMIL as a practical and scalable solution for WSI analysis in clinical pathology.
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