Hierarchical Optimal Transport for Comparing Histopathology DatasetsDownload PDF

Published: 28 Feb 2022, Last Modified: 26 Mar 2024MIDL 2022Readers: Everyone
Keywords: Histopathology, domain adaptation, transfer learning, optimal transport
TL;DR: Optimal transport provides a distance between slides and between histopathology datasets, improves upon baseline methods, and correlates with difficulty of transfer learning.
Abstract: Scarcity of labeled histopathology data limits the applicability of deep learning methods to under-profiled cancer types and labels. Transfer learning allows researchers to overcome the limitations of small datasets by pre-training machine learning models on larger datasets similar to the small target dataset. However, similarity between datasets is often determined heuristically. In this paper, we propose a principled notion of distance between histopathology datasets based on a hierarchical generalization of optimal transport distances. Our method does not require any training, is agnostic to model type, and preserves much of the hierarchical structure in histopathology datasets imposed by tiling. We apply our method to H&E stained slides from The Cancer Genome Atlas from six different cancer types. We show that our method outperforms a baseline distance in a cancer-type prediction task. Our results also show that our optimal transport distance predicts difficulty of transferability in a tumor vs. normal prediction setting.
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Paper Type: both
Primary Subject Area: Transfer Learning and Domain Adaptation
Secondary Subject Area: Application: Histopathology
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Code And Data: https://github.com/ayeaton/HHOT
Community Implementations: [![CatalyzeX](/images/catalyzex_icon.svg) 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2204.08324/code)
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