Improving the Self-Supervised Pretext Task for Histopathologic Subtype Classification

Ruiwen Ding, Anil Yadav, Erika Rodriguez, Ana Cristina Araujo Lemos da Silva, William Hsu

Keywords: Self-supervised learning, pretext task, histopathology, lung adenocarcinoma

TL;DR: A novel pretext task for pathology image classification based on the multi-resolution nature of whole slide images.

Abstract: In computational pathology, fully-supervised convolutional neural networks have been shown to perform well on tasks such as histology segmentation and classification but require large amounts of expert-annotated labels. In this work, we propose a self-supervised learning pretext task that utilizes the multi-resolution nature of whole slide images to reduce labeling effort. Given a pair of image tiles cropped at different magnification levels, our model predicts whether one tile is contained in the other. We hypothesize that this task induces the model to learn to distinguish different structures presented in the images, thus benefiting the downstream classification. The potential of our method was shown in downstream classification of lung adenocarcinoma histologic subtypes using H\&E-images from the National Lung Screening Trial.

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Paper Type: novel methodological ideas without extensive validation

Primary Subject Area: Learning with Noisy Labels and Limited Data

Secondary Subject Area: Application: Histopathology

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