通过患者级主动学习,大幅减少病理切片标注工作量。
Slide-Level Active Learning Reduces Annotation Burden in H&E images

- 采用滑块级混合不确定性策略,提升标注效率。
- 仅用26%标注预算即达0.80 Dice,优于现有方法。
- 适合需要高效标注且跨数据集泛化强的病理分析场景。
基于深度学习的组织病理全切片图像(WSIs)分割需要大量像素级标注,获取成本高、耗时长。主动学习(AL)被提出以降低标注负担,但现有方法存在三大缺陷:部分标注切片上不确定性估计不可靠,补丁级选样与滑块级标注流程不一致,多类别设置下类别不平衡未被显式处理。为此,本文提出SHAL(Slide-level Hybrid Active Learning),一种面向多类别病理分割的患者级主动学习框架。SHAL融合三项互补机制:前景感知策略抑制未标注背景区域的偏差,阶段自适应机制在不同学习阶段融合预测熵与认知不确定性,类别感知策略优先标注诊断相关组织类别。在TCGA结直肠癌数据集上评估,SHAL在全标注预算下达到最高宏Dice值(0.846),仅使用26%预算(50/190张切片)即实现Dice≥0.80,而对比方法需37%(70张切片)。在五个独立外部队列中,SHAL取得最高平均外部宏Dice(0.815),内部到外部泛化差距最小(第3轮为0.025,全预算为0.026)。结果表明,患者级混合不确定性采样可在不牺牲跨域泛化能力的前提下显著降低标注成本。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Deep learning-based segmentation of histopathology whole-slide images (WSIs) requires large amounts of pixel-level annotations, which are costly and time-consuming to obtain. Active learning (AL) has been proposed to reduce this effort, but existing methods exhibit three key limitations. Uncertainty estimation is unreliable on partially annotated WSIs, patch-level acquisition is inconsistent with slide-level annotation workflows, and class imbalance in multi-class settings is not explicitly addressed. To address these challenges, we propose SHAL (Slide-level Hybrid Active Learning), a patient-level AL framework for annotation-efficient multi-class histopathology segmentation. SHAL integrates three complementary components: a foreground-aware strategy that suppresses bias from unlabeled background regions, a stage-adaptive mechanism that hybridizes predictive entropy and epistemic uncertainty across learning stages, and a class-aware strategy that prioritizes diagnostically relevant tissue classes. SHAL is evaluated on the TCGA colorectal cancer dataset. It achieves the highest Macro Dice at the full annotation budget (0.846) and reaches Dice greater than or equal to 0.80 using only 26 percent of the budget (50 of 190 slides), whereas competing methods reach this threshold only at 37 percent (70 slides). Across five independent external cohorts, SHAL attains the highest mean external Macro Dice (0.815) and the smallest internal-to-external generalization gap among all methods (0.025 at Round 3 and 0.026 at the full budget). The results indicate that patient-level hybrid uncertainty acquisition reduces annotation cost without sacrificing cross-domain generalization in computational pathology.
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