Supervision and Source Domain Impact on Representation Learning: A Histopathology Case Study
This work addresses the need for efficient representation learning in pathology, where labeling large datasets is tedious, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a specific domain.
The study tackled the challenge of representation learning in histopathology by exploring deep neural networks with triplet loss across unsupervised, semi-supervised, and supervised setups, achieving high accuracy and generalization on two public datasets.
As many algorithms depend on a suitable representation of data, learning unique features is considered a crucial task. Although supervised techniques using deep neural networks have boosted the performance of representation learning, the need for a large set of labeled data limits the application of such methods. As an example, high-quality delineations of regions of interest in the field of pathology is a tedious and time-consuming task due to the large image dimensions. In this work, we explored the performance of a deep neural network and triplet loss in the area of representation learning. We investigated the notion of similarity and dissimilarity in pathology whole-slide images and compared different setups from unsupervised and semi-supervised to supervised learning in our experiments. Additionally, different approaches were tested, applying few-shot learning on two publicly available pathology image datasets. We achieved high accuracy and generalization when the learned representations were applied to two different pathology datasets.