arXiv:2606.26157cs.IRcs.AI2026-06

通过去除无关组织的冗余切片,大幅降低病理图像存储成本。

Reducing Redundancy in Whole-Slide Image Patching for Scalable Indexing and Retrieval

论文配图:Reducing Redundancy in Whole-Slide Image Patching for Scalable Indexing and Retrieval
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 识别不同组织类别的差异性特征,剔除对分类贡献小的冗余切片。
  • 在TCGA数据集上实现3%至60%的存储压缩(平均14%±13%)。
  • 适合需要高效检索的临床级AI系统,提升可扩展性。

数字病理学的快速发展催生了对全切片图像(WSI)高效索引与检索的迫切需求,尤其在生成式AI工作流中,如检索增强生成(RAG),依赖可靠的相似性搜索支持高风险临床决策。然而高性能存储的高昂成本限制了多数医疗机构对WSI索引的可扩展性与可及性。为此,我们提出ARReST(反向冗余削减策略),一种基于对立性原则的框架,利用不同组织类别间的冗余特性,显著减少需索引的每张WSI切片数量。不同于仅消除同类重复,ARReST识别那些在跨类别区分中贡献微弱的反向切片,并将其从可搜索库中移除。这种精准削减有效压缩索引规模,同时保持形态多样性与检索准确性。通过最小化冗余切片表示,ARReST降低了存储开销与计算负担,加速大规模病理数据库中的相似性搜索。在包含21个器官的TCGA数据集上进行的广泛实验表明,该方法实现了显著的索引压缩,且保持了竞争性的检索性能。观测到的存储节省为3%至60%(平均14%±13%),且在多数器官上未牺牲检索效果。该策略使可扩展、低成本的WSI索引成为可能,适用于下一代以检索驱动的临床人工智能系统。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

The rapid growth of digital pathology has created an urgent need for efficient indexing and retrieval of whole slide images (WSIs). This need is intensified by emerging generative AI workflows, particularly retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which require dependable similarity search to support high-stakes clinical decision-making. Yet the substantial cost of high-performance storage limits the scalability and accessibility of WSI indexing for many healthcare institutions. Consequently, methods that can reduce storage demands while preserving retrieval accuracy have become a critical research priority. We propose ARReST (Antithetical Redundancy Reduction Strategy), a principled oppositional framework that leverages redundancy across dissimilar tissue classes to markedly decrease the number of patches that must be indexed from each WSI. Instead of eliminating only within-class duplicates, ARReST identifies antithetical patches-those whose representations contribute minimally to cross-class discrimination-and prunes them from the searchable archive. This targeted reduction substantially compresses the index without sacrificing morphological diversity or retrieval fidelity. By minimizing superfluous patch representations, ARReST reduces storage footprint, lowers computational overhead, and accelerates similarity search across large pathology repositories. Extensive experiments on TCGA repository (The Cancer Genome Atlas with 21 organs) demonstrate that ARReST achieves significant index compression while maintaining competitive retrieval performance. The observed storage savings of 3% to 60% (14%$\pm$13%) can be reliably achieved without compromising retrieval performance for many organs. The proposed strategy enables scalable, cost-efficient WSI indexing and is well-suited for next-generation retrieval-driven clinical AI systems.

病理图像索引压缩AI医疗检索增强

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