让扩散模型适应细胞图像的旋转对称性,提升异常检测稳定性。
Group Equivariant Diffusion for Anomaly Detection in Computational Cytology

- 设计D4对称性扩散模型,保持细胞旋转翻转下的诊断一致性。
- 在骨髓和外周血数据集上AUC更高,异常细胞召回率提升20%以上。
- 适合病理图像中稀有异常检测,尤其对小样本场景友好。
全切片图像的计算细胞学分析因恶性细胞稀少、异质性强且标注数据稀缺而具有挑战性。异常检测框架可在正常无标注块上训练,并在测试时识别新切片中的异常块。现有无监督方法(如基于GAN或扩散模型)多针对器官级成像,依赖大规模标注数据。而细胞学信号以细胞为中心:单个细胞图像旋转或翻转不改变其诊断类别,但标准扩散模型将变换视作不同输入,导致重建结果随变换变化,异常评分不稳定。本文提出一种D4等变扩散框架,通过D4等变U-Net架构及推理时等变噪声耦合与可选帧平均,在结构和推理层面均实现旋转反射对称性。该设计契合生物学不变性,获得变换一致的伪健康重建,提升异常排序稳定性。在两个公开骨髓和外周血涂片数据集上,所提模型在AUC和前K名异常细胞召回率上均优于非等变生成基线、深度单类分类器及多实例学习方法,同时显著降低旋转/翻转下的评分方差。代码已开源:https://swchmida.github.io/D4diffCyto/。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Computational cytology on whole-slide images is challenging because malignant cells are rare, heterogeneous, and annotated slides are scarce. Anomaly detection frameworks can be trained on normal slide-negative patches and then applied at test time to flag abnormal patches in held-out slides. Most unsupervised anomaly detection approaches including generative ones (GAN-based and diffusion-based), are tuned to organ-level imaging and require large curated datasets. In cytology the signal is cell-centric: rotating or flipping a single-cell patch does not change its diagnostic class, yet standard diffusion models treat transformed views as distinct inputs, leading to transformation-dependent reconstructions and unstable anomaly scores. We propose a D4-equivariant diffusion framework that enforces rotation and reflection symmetry both architecturally, via a D4-equivariant U-Net, and at inference, via equivariant noise coupling and (optionally) frame averaging. This alignment with biological invariance yields transformation-consistent pseudo-healthy reconstructions and more stable anomaly ranking under symmetry. On two publicly available cytology datasets of bone marrow and peripheral blood smears, our D4-equivariant diffusion models achieve higher AUC and retrieve more abnormal cells in the top K predictions than non-equivariant generative baselines, a deep one-class, and a multiple instance learning based method, while substantially reducing score variance across rotations and flips. Code is available at https://swchmida.github.io/D4diffCyto/.
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