用疾病概念指导切片分类,提升准确率并减少计算量
CGRL: Concept-Guided Pruning and Representation Learning for Whole-Slide Image Classification

- 引入疾病概念原型,筛选与疾病最相关的图像块
- 通过对比学习优化特征表示,提升类别区分度
- 适合弱监督病理图像分析,尤其对计算资源有限的场景
弱监督全切片图像(WSI)分类在计算病理学中广泛应用,因切片级标签比密集区域标注更易获取。现有多数实例学习(MIL)方法主要依赖视觉线索聚合大量图像块嵌入,常保留大量无信息块,并导致实例特征与疾病语义对齐不足。我们提出概念引导剪枝与表征学习(CGRL),在MIL流程中引入基于疾病提示的类别级概念原型。首先,通过概念相关性剪枝按相似度排序图像块,仅保留前K个与概念最相关的块用于下游聚合;其次,利用相似度矩阵构建类别内正负样本集,优化目标类别、对称辅助及跨类别分离目标,从而规整投影后的概念空间。我们在TCGA-BRCA和TCGA-NSCLC数据集上使用多种代表性MIL方法评估CGRL。实验表明,该方法在多个模型-数据组合上均取得提升,尤其在准确率和宏平均F1上表现显著,同时通过剪枝降低计算成本。结果表明,类别级语义概念为弱监督病理图像中的块选择与表征学习提供了有效且实用的先验。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Weakly supervised whole-slide image (WSI) classification is widely used in computational pathology because slide-level labels are easier to obtain than dense region annotations. Existing multiple instance learning (MIL) methods often aggregate large bags of patch embeddings using mainly visual cues, which can retain many non-informative patches and provide weak alignment between instance features and class-level disease semantics. We propose Concept-Guided Pruning and Representation Learning (CGRL), a simple framework that introduces class-level concept prototypes derived from disease prompts into the MIL pipeline. First, concept-relevance pruning ranks patch instances by their similarity to class concepts and retains the top-K concept-relevant patches for downstream MIL aggregation. Second, concept-guided contrastive representation learning constructs class-wise positive and negative patch sets from the same similarity matrix and optimizes target-class, symmetric auxiliary, and cross-class separation objectives, thereby regularizing the projected concept space. We evaluate CGRL on TCGA-BRCA and TCGA-NSCLC using multiple representative MIL methods. Experimental results show that CGRL improves several model-dataset combinations, with gains depending on the downstream MIL model and dataset. It achieves particularly clear improvements in accuracy and macro-F1 while reducing computational cost through concept-relevance pruning. These findings demonstrate that class-level semantic concepts provide an effective and practical prior for patch selection and representation learning in weakly supervised computational pathology.
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