Dual-channel Prototype Network for few-shot Classification of Pathological Images

In pathology, the rarity of certain diseases and the complexity in annotating pathological images significantly hinder the creation of extensive, high-quality datasets. This limitation impedes the progress of deep learning-assisted diagnostic systems in pathology. Consequently, it becomes imperative to devise a technology that can discern new disease categories from a minimal number of annotated examples. Such a technology would substantially advance deep learning models for rare diseases. Addressing this need, we introduce the Dual-channel Prototype Network (DCPN), rooted in the few-shot learning paradigm, to tackle the challenge of classifying pathological images with limited samples. DCPN augments the Pyramid Vision Transformer (PVT) framework for few-shot classification via self-supervised learning and integrates it with convolutional neural networks. This combination forms a dual-channel architecture that extracts multi-scale, highly precise pathological features. The approach enhances the versatility of prototype representations and elevates the efficacy of prototype networks in few-shot pathological image classification tasks. We evaluated DCPN using three publicly available pathological datasets, configuring small-sample classification tasks that mirror varying degrees of clinical scenario domain shifts. Our experimental findings robustly affirm DCPN's superiority in few-shot pathological image classification, particularly in tasks within the same domain, where it achieves the benchmarks of supervised learning.

A Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework for Rapid Diagnosis of Whole Slide Pathological Images

The deep neural network is a research hotspot for histopathological image analysis, which can improve the efficiency and accuracy of diagnosis for pathologists or be used for disease screening. The whole slide pathological image can reach one gigapixel and contains abundant tissue feature information, which needs to be divided into a lot of patches in the training and inference stages. This will lead to a long convergence time and large memory consumption. Furthermore, well-annotated data sets are also in short supply in the field of digital pathology. Inspired by the pathologist's clinical diagnosis process, we propose a weakly supervised deep reinforcement learning framework, which can greatly reduce the time required for network inference. We use neural network to construct the search model and decision model of reinforcement learning agent respectively. The search model predicts the next action through the image features of different magnifications in the current field of view, and the decision model is used to return the predicted probability of the current field of view image. In addition, an expert-guided model is constructed by multi-instance learning, which not only provides rewards for search model, but also guides decision model learning by the knowledge distillation method. Experimental results show that our proposed method can achieve fast inference and accurate prediction of whole slide images without any pixel-level annotations.