Yufang He

Tianyi Zhang, Youdan Feng, Yunlu Feng et al.

The rapid on-site evaluation (ROSE) technique can signifi-cantly accelerate the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer by im-mediately analyzing the fast-stained cytopathological images. Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) can potentially address the shortage of pathologists in ROSE. However, the cancerous patterns vary significantly between different samples, making the CAD task extremely challenging. Besides, the ROSE images have complicated perturbations regarding color distribution, brightness, and contrast due to different staining qualities and various acquisition device types. To address these challenges, we proposed a shuffle instances-based Vision Transformer (SI-ViT) approach, which can reduce the perturbations and enhance the modeling among the instances. With the regrouped bags of shuffle instances and their bag-level soft labels, the approach utilizes a regression head to make the model focus on the cells rather than various perturbations. Simultaneously, combined with a classification head, the model can effectively identify the general distributive patterns among different instances. The results demonstrate significant improvements in the classification accuracy with more accurate attention regions, indicating that the diverse patterns of ROSE images are effectively extracted, and the complicated perturbations are significantly reduced. It also suggests that the SI-ViT has excellent potential in analyzing cytopathological images. The code and experimental results are available at https://github.com/sagizty/MIL-SI.

Zeyu Liu, Tianyi Zhang, Yufang He et al.

Deep learning is widely applied in computer-aided pathological diagnosis, which alleviates the pathologist workload and provide timely clinical analysis. However, most models generally require large-scale annotated data for training, which faces challenges due to the sampling and annotation scarcity in pathological images. The rapid developing generative models shows potential to generate more training samples from recent studies. However, they also struggle in generalization diversity with limited training data, incapable of generating effective samples. Inspired by the pathological transitions between different stages, we propose an adaptive depth-controlled diffusion (ADD) network to generate pathological progressive images for effective data augmentation. This novel approach roots in domain migration, where a hybrid attention strategy guides the bidirectional diffusion, blending local and global attention priorities. With feature measuring, the adaptive depth-controlled strategy ensures the migration and maintains locational similarity in simulating the pathological feature transition. Based on tiny training set (samples less than 500), the ADD yields cross-domain progressive images with corresponding soft-labels. Experiments on two datasets suggest significant improvements in generation diversity, and the effectiveness with generated progressive samples are highlighted in downstream classifications. The code is available at https://github.com/Rowerliu/ADD.