SLPD: Slide-level Prototypical Distillation for WSIs

Improving the feature representation ability is the foundation of many whole slide pathological image (WSIs) tasks. Recent works have achieved great success in pathological-specific self-supervised learning (SSL). However, most of them only focus on learning patch-level representations, thus there is still a gap between pretext and slide-level downstream tasks, e.g., subtyping, grading and staging. Aiming towards slide-level representations, we propose Slide-Level Prototypical Distillation (SLPD) to explore intra- and inter-slide semantic structures for context modeling on WSIs. Specifically, we iteratively perform intra-slide clustering for the regions (4096x4096 patches) within each WSI to yield the prototypes and encourage the region representations to be closer to the assigned prototypes. By representing each slide with its prototypes, we further select similar slides by the set distance of prototypes and assign the regions by cross-slide prototypes for distillation. SLPD achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple slide-level benchmarks and demonstrates that representation learning of semantic structures of slides can make a suitable proxy task for WSI analysis. Code will be available at https://github.com/Carboxy/SLPD.

Interventional Bag Multi-Instance Learning On Whole-Slide Pathological Images

Multi-instance learning (MIL) is an effective paradigm for whole-slide pathological images (WSIs) classification to handle the gigapixel resolution and slide-level label. Prevailing MIL methods primarily focus on improving the feature extractor and aggregator. However, one deficiency of these methods is that the bag contextual prior may trick the model into capturing spurious correlations between bags and labels. This deficiency is a confounder that limits the performance of existing MIL methods. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme, Interventional Bag Multi-Instance Learning (IBMIL), to achieve deconfounded bag-level prediction. Unlike traditional likelihood-based strategies, the proposed scheme is based on the backdoor adjustment to achieve the interventional training, thus is capable of suppressing the bias caused by the bag contextual prior. Note that the principle of IBMIL is orthogonal to existing bag MIL methods. Therefore, IBMIL is able to bring consistent performance boosting to existing schemes, achieving new state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at https://github.com/HHHedo/IBMIL.