Nucleus subtype classification using inter-modality learning

Understanding the way cells communicate, co-locate, and interrelate is essential to understanding human physiology. Hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining is ubiquitously available both for clinical studies and research. The Colon Nucleus Identification and Classification (CoNIC) Challenge has recently innovated on robust artificial intelligence labeling of six cell types on H&E stains of the colon. However, this is a very small fraction of the number of potential cell classification types. Specifically, the CoNIC Challenge is unable to classify epithelial subtypes (progenitor, endocrine, goblet), lymphocyte subtypes (B, helper T, cytotoxic T), or connective subtypes (fibroblasts, stromal). In this paper, we propose to use inter-modality learning to label previously un-labelable cell types on virtual H&E. We leveraged multiplexed immunofluorescence (MxIF) histology imaging to identify 14 subclasses of cell types. We performed style transfer to synthesize virtual H&E from MxIF and transferred the higher density labels from MxIF to these virtual H&E images. We then evaluated the efficacy of learning in this approach. We identified helper T and progenitor nuclei with positive predictive values of $0.34 \pm 0.15$ (prevalence $0.03 \pm 0.01$) and $0.47 \pm 0.1$ (prevalence $0.07 \pm 0.02$) respectively on virtual H&E. This approach represents a promising step towards automating annotation in digital pathology.

Cell Spatial Analysis in Crohn's Disease: Unveiling Local Cell Arrangement Pattern with Graph-based Signatures

Crohn's disease (CD) is a chronic and relapsing inflammatory condition that affects segments of the gastrointestinal tract. CD activity is determined by histological findings, particularly the density of neutrophils observed on Hematoxylin and Eosin stains (H&E) imaging. However, understanding the broader morphometry and local cell arrangement beyond cell counting and tissue morphology remains challenging. To address this, we characterize six distinct cell types from H&E images and develop a novel approach for the local spatial signature of each cell. Specifically, we create a 10-cell neighborhood matrix, representing neighboring cell arrangements for each individual cell. Utilizing t-SNE for non-linear spatial projection in scatter-plot and Kernel Density Estimation contour-plot formats, our study examines patterns of differences in the cellular environment associated with the odds ratio of spatial patterns between active CD and control groups. This analysis is based on data collected at the two research institutes. The findings reveal heterogeneous nearest-neighbor patterns, signifying distinct tendencies of cell clustering, with a particular focus on the rectum region. These variations underscore the impact of data heterogeneity on cell spatial arrangements in CD patients. Moreover, the spatial distribution disparities between the two research sites highlight the significance of collaborative efforts among healthcare organizations. All research analysis pipeline tools are available at https://github.com/MASILab/cellNN.

Feasibility of Universal Anomaly Detection without Knowing the Abnormality in Medical Images

Many anomaly detection approaches, especially deep learning methods, have been recently developed to identify abnormal image morphology by only employing normal images during training. Unfortunately, many prior anomaly detection methods were optimized for a specific "known" abnormality (e.g., brain tumor, bone fraction, cell types). Moreover, even though only the normal images were used in the training process, the abnormal images were oftenly employed during the validation process (e.g., epoch selection, hyper-parameter tuning), which might leak the supposed ``unknown" abnormality unintentionally. In this study, we investigated these two essential aspects regarding universal anomaly detection in medical images by (1) comparing various anomaly detection methods across four medical datasets, (2) investigating the inevitable but often neglected issues on how to unbiasedly select the optimal anomaly detection model during the validation phase using only normal images, and (3) proposing a simple decision-level ensemble method to leverage the advantage of different kinds of anomaly detection without knowing the abnormality. The results of our experiments indicate that none of the evaluated methods consistently achieved the best performance across all datasets. Our proposed method enhanced the robustness of performance in general (average AUC 0.956).

Cross-scale Multi-instance Learning for Pathological Image Diagnosis

Analyzing high resolution whole slide images (WSIs) with regard to information across multiple scales poses a significant challenge in digital pathology. Multi-instance learning (MIL) is a common solution for working with high resolution images by classifying bags of objects (i.e. sets of smaller image patches). However, such processing is typically performed at a single scale (e.g., 20x magnification) of WSIs, disregarding the vital inter-scale information that is key to diagnoses by human pathologists. In this study, we propose a novel cross-scale MIL algorithm to explicitly aggregate inter-scale relationships into a single MIL network for pathological image diagnosis. The contribution of this paper is three-fold: (1) A novel cross-scale MIL (CS-MIL) algorithm that integrates the multi-scale information and the inter-scale relationships is proposed; (2) A toy dataset with scale-specific morphological features is created and released to examine and visualize differential cross-scale attention; (3) Superior performance on both in-house and public datasets is demonstrated by our simple cross-scale MIL strategy. The official implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/hrlblab/CS-MIL.

Cross-scale Attention Guided Multi-instance Learning for Crohn's Disease Diagnosis with Pathological Images

Multi-instance learning (MIL) is widely used in the computer-aided interpretation of pathological Whole Slide Images (WSIs) to solve the lack of pixel-wise or patch-wise annotations. Often, this approach directly applies "natural image driven" MIL algorithms which overlook the multi-scale (i.e. pyramidal) nature of WSIs. Off-the-shelf MIL algorithms are typically deployed on a single-scale of WSIs (e.g., 20x magnification), while human pathologists usually aggregate the global and local patterns in a multi-scale manner (e.g., by zooming in and out between different magnifications). In this study, we propose a novel cross-scale attention mechanism to explicitly aggregate inter-scale interactions into a single MIL network for Crohn's Disease (CD), which is a form of inflammatory bowel disease. The contribution of this paper is two-fold: (1) a cross-scale attention mechanism is proposed to aggregate features from different resolutions with multi-scale interaction; and (2) differential multi-scale attention visualizations are generated to localize explainable lesion patterns. By training ~250,000 H&E-stained Ascending Colon (AC) patches from 20 CD patient and 30 healthy control samples at different scales, our approach achieved a superior Area under the Curve (AUC) score of 0.8924 compared with baseline models. The official implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/hrlblab/CS-MIL.

Circle Representation for Medical Object Detection

Box representation has been extensively used for object detection in computer vision. Such representation is efficacious but not necessarily optimized for biomedical objects (e.g., glomeruli), which play an essential role in renal pathology. In this paper, we propose a simple circle representation for medical object detection and introduce CircleNet, an anchor-free detection framework. Compared with the conventional bounding box representation, the proposed bounding circle representation innovates in three-fold: (1) it is optimized for ball-shaped biomedical objects; (2) The circle representation reduced the degree of freedom compared with box representation; (3) It is naturally more rotation invariant. When detecting glomeruli and nuclei on pathological images, the proposed circle representation achieved superior detection performance and be more rotation-invariant, compared with the bounding box. The code has been made publicly available: https://github.com/hrlblab/CircleNet

Random Multi-Channel Image Synthesis for Multiplexed Immunofluorescence Imaging

Multiplex immunofluorescence (MxIF) is an emerging imaging technique that produces the high sensitivity and specificity of single-cell mapping. With a tenet of 'seeing is believing', MxIF enables iterative staining and imaging extensive antibodies, which provides comprehensive biomarkers to segment and group different cells on a single tissue section. However, considerable depletion of the scarce tissue is inevitable from extensive rounds of staining and bleaching ('missing tissue'). Moreover, the immunofluorescence (IF) imaging can globally fail for particular rounds ('missing stain''). In this work, we focus on the 'missing stain' issue. It would be appealing to develop digital image synthesis approaches to restore missing stain images without losing more tissue physically. Herein, we aim to develop image synthesis approaches for eleven MxIF structural molecular markers (i.e., epithelial and stromal) on real samples. We propose a novel multi-channel high-resolution image synthesis approach, called pixN2N-HD, to tackle possible missing stain scenarios via a high-resolution generative adversarial network (GAN). Our contribution is three-fold: (1) a single deep network framework is proposed to tackle missing stain in MxIF; (2) the proposed 'N-to-N' strategy reduces theoretical four years of computational time to 20 hours when covering all possible missing stains scenarios, with up to five missing stains (e.g., '(N-1)-to-1', '(N-2)-to-2'); and (3) this work is the first comprehensive experimental study of investigating cross-stain synthesis in MxIF. Our results elucidate a promising direction of advancing MxIF imaging with deep image synthesis.

MITI Minimum Information guidelines for highly multiplexed tissue images

The imminent release of atlases combining highly multiplexed tissue imaging with single cell sequencing and other omics data from human tissues and tumors creates an urgent need for data and metadata standards compliant with emerging and traditional approaches to histology. We describe the development of a Minimum Information about highly multiplexed Tissue Imaging (MITI) standard that draws on best practices from genomics and microscopy of cultured cells and model organisms.

SimTriplet: Simple Triplet Representation Learning with a Single GPU

Contrastive learning is a key technique of modern self-supervised learning. The broader accessibility of earlier approaches is hindered by the need of heavy computational resources (e.g., at least 8 GPUs or 32 TPU cores), which accommodate for large-scale negative samples or momentum. The more recent SimSiam approach addresses such key limitations via stop-gradient without momentum encoders. In medical image analysis, multiple instances can be achieved from the same patient or tissue. Inspired by these advances, we propose a simple triplet representation learning (SimTriplet) approach on pathological images. The contribution of the paper is three-fold: (1) The proposed SimTriplet method takes advantage of the multi-view nature of medical images beyond self-augmentation; (2) The method maximizes both intra-sample and inter-sample similarities via triplets from positive pairs, without using negative samples; and (3) The recent mix precision training is employed to advance the training by only using a single GPU with 16GB memory. By learning from 79,000 unlabeled pathological patch images, SimTriplet achieved 10.58% better performance compared with supervised learning. It also achieved 2.13% better performance compared with SimSiam. Our proposed SimTriplet can achieve decent performance using only 1% labeled data. The code and data are available at https://github.com/hrlblab/SimTriple.

CircleNet: Anchor-free Detection with Circle Representation

Object detection networks are powerful in computer vision, but not necessarily optimized for biomedical object detection. In this work, we propose CircleNet, a simple anchor-free detection method with circle representation for detection of the ball-shaped glomerulus. Different from the traditional bounding box based detection method, the bounding circle (1) reduces the degrees of freedom of detection representation, (2) is naturally rotation invariant, (3) and optimized for ball-shaped objects. The key innovation to enable this representation is the anchor-free framework with the circle detection head. We evaluate CircleNet in the context of detection of glomerulus. CircleNet increases average precision of the glomerulus detection from 0.598 to 0.647. Another key advantage is that CircleNet achieves better rotation consistency compared with bounding box representations.