Pre-processing matters: A segment search method for WSI classification

Jun Wang, Yufei Cui, Yu Mao, Nan Guan, Chun Jason Xue

Abstract: Pre-processing whole slide images (WSIs) can impact classification performance. Our study shows that using fixed hyper-parameters for pre-processing out-of-domain WSIs can significantly degrade performance. Therefore, it is critical to search domain-specific hyper-parameters during inference. However, searching for an optimal parameter set is time-consuming. To overcome this, we propose SSAPT, a novel Similarity-based Simulated Annealing approach for fast parameter tuning to enhance inference performance on out-of-domain data. The proposed SSAPT achieves 5\% to 50\% improvement in accuracy with $\times5$ times faster parameter searching speed on average.