Strength in Diversity: Understanding the impacts of diverse training sets in self-supervised pre-training for histology images

Kristina Lynn Kupferschmidt, Eu Wern Teh, Graham W. Taylor

Keywords: Self-supervised learning, digital histopathology

TL;DR: This paper explores cross-domain self-supervised learning in digital histopathology images.

Abstract: Self-supervised learning (SSL) has demonstrated success in computer vision tasks for natural images, and recently histopathological images, where there is limited availability of annotations. Despite this, there has been limited research into how the diversity of source data used for SSL tasks impacts performance. The current study quantifies changes to downstream classification of metastatic tissue in lymph node sections of the PatchCamelyon dataset when datasets from different domains (natural images, textures, histology) are used for SSL pre-training. We show that for cases with limited training data, using diverse datasets from different domains for SSL pre-training can achieve comparable performance when compared with SSL pre-training on the target dataset.

Paper Type: validation/application paper

Primary Subject Area: Application: Histopathology

Secondary Subject Area: Transfer Learning and Domain Adaptation

Paper Status: original work, not submitted yet

Source Code Url: https://github.com/kristinakupf/Histo_StrengthInDiversity

Data Set Url:

Patch Camelyon (PCam) Dataset: https://github.com/basveeling/pcam,
Colorectal Cancer (CRC) Dataset: https://zenodo.org/record/53169#.YGz4ymRueWD,
ALOT Dataset: http://color.univ-lille.fr/datasets/alot,
TinyImageNet Dataset: https://www.kaggle.com/c/tiny-imagenet/data

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