解决病理图像中罕见病种识别难题,提升小样本类别准确率。
DeCo-MIL: Debiased Counterfactual Reasoning for Long-Tailed Whole Slide Image Analysis

- 通过反事实推理消除数据冗余,聚焦稀有病灶特征。
- 在三个病理图像数据集上显著提升罕见类别识别性能。
- 适合医学图像分析、弱监督学习研究者参考。
多实例学习(MIL)广泛用于弱监督的全切片图像(WSI)分析。但在长尾分布下,基于MIL的WSI分析面临嵌套双重长尾问题:滑片间类别长尾与滑片内实例级判别证据的长尾。两者耦合导致尾部类别训练滑片少,且其诊断证据集中于少数区域,被大量袋内冗余掩盖。这使模型偏向头部类别,降低稀有类别识别能力。为此,我们提出DeCo-MIL,通过频率去偏反事实推理联合缓解双重长尾。针对内部长尾,将切片块聚类为组织形态锚点,用对应正常原型替换锚点进行反事实干预,结合类别频率校正预测估计其对真实类别的反事实贡献,据此引导冗余掩码以保留稀缺判别实例。针对外部长尾,从去冗余袋构建锚点分层伪袋,结合尾部感知过采样与一致性正则化,在保持组织形态结构的同时增强尾部类别有效监督。在三个长尾WSI基准上的实验表明,DeCo-MIL在尾部类别识别和整体分类上均达到当前最优性能。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Multiple instance learning (MIL) is widely used for weakly supervised whole slide image (WSI) analysis. However, under long-tailed distributions, MIL-based WSI analysis faces a nested dual long-tail: an inter-slide class long tail and an intra-slide long tail of instance-level discriminative evidence. The two long tails are coupled: tail classes have few training slides, while their limited diagnostic evidence is concentrated in a few patches and obscured by abundant within-bag redundancy. This coupling biases models toward head classes and degrades rare-class recognition. To address this, we propose DeCo-MIL for long-tailed WSI analysis, which jointly alleviates the nested dual long-tail through frequency-debiased counterfactual reasoning. For the inner long tail, DeCo-MIL clusters patches into tissue-morphology anchors, replaces each anchor with its matched normal prototype to perform a counterfactual intervention, and estimates its counterfactual contribution to the ground-truth class using class-frequency-corrected predictions. These contributions guide redundancy masking to preserve scarce discriminative instances. For the outer long tail, DeCo-MIL constructs anchor-stratified pseudo-bags from redundancy-reduced bags and combines tail-aware oversampling with consistency regularization, increasing effective supervision for tail classes while preserving tissue-morphology composition. Extensive experiments on three long-tailed WSI benchmarks demonstrate that DeCo-MIL achieves state-of-the-art performance in both tail-class recognition and overall classification.
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