用低倍病理图像实现高效弱监督分割,突破存储与标注瓶颈
Toward Efficient Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation Using Only Low-Magnification Histopathological Images

- 通过插值和深度重建模拟低倍图像,构建可量化评估的弱监督分割框架
- 发现低分辨率下小结构定位能力在特定阈值后显著下降,重建质量无法预测分割性能
- 为数字病理存储系统设计提供实证指导,适合医学影像与医疗AI研究者
全切片图像(WSIs)包含丰富的组织与细胞级信息,但高倍率病理数据的存储与传输成本高昂。同时,像素级标注耗时费力。本文系统评估仅使用低倍病理图像与图像级标签时的弱监督语义分割性能。从高分辨率图像块出发,模拟不同低倍输入,并采用插值与基于深度学习的方法重建至原始尺寸,再执行弱监督分割流程。该框架实现了对不同分辨率退化程度下分割表现的定量分析。实验表明,重建质量指标本身不足以预测下游分割效果。特别地,研究识别出一个关键降质点:此时小尺度结构定位能力显著下降。这些发现为兼顾效率与自动分析可靠性的数字病理存储系统设计提供了实践依据。代码已开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Whole-slide images (WSIs) provide rich tissue-level and cellular-level information, but storing and transmitting high-magnification pathology data is resource-intensive. Moreover, annotating WSIs at the pixel level is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Therefore, it is important to investigate whether low-magnification pathology images with limited annotations (i.e., image-level instead of pixel-level labels) can achieve performance comparable to high-magnification images. This paper presents a systematic benchmark study on weakly supervised histopathological image segmentation under different low-resolution storage settings. Starting from high-resolution image patches, we simulate lower-magnification inputs and reconstruct them to the original size using interpolation and deep learning-based reconstruction methods before applying the weakly-supervised segmentation pipeline. This framework enables a quantitative evaluation of how weakly supervised methods respond to different levels of resolution degradation. Experimental results show that reconstruction quality metrics alone are insufficient to predict downstream segmentation performance. In particular, the study identifies a critical degradation point where the localization of small-scale structures declines significantly. These findings provide practical guidance for designing efficient digital pathology storage systems while maintaining reliable automated analysis. Code is available at https://github.com/Dung-Dx/LowMagWSS
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