PathLDM: Text conditioned Latent Diffusion Model for Histopathology
This work addresses data efficiency in computational pathology, an incremental improvement for generating histopathology images using text conditioning.
The paper tackles the challenge of generating high-quality histopathology images with limited data by introducing PathLDM, a text-conditioned latent diffusion model that uses pathology reports for guidance, achieving a state-of-the-art FID score of 7.64 on the TCGA-BRCA dataset, significantly outperforming the closest competitor with FID 30.1.
To achieve high-quality results, diffusion models must be trained on large datasets. This can be notably prohibitive for models in specialized domains, such as computational pathology. Conditioning on labeled data is known to help in data-efficient model training. Therefore, histopathology reports, which are rich in valuable clinical information, are an ideal choice as guidance for a histopathology generative model. In this paper, we introduce PathLDM, the first text-conditioned Latent Diffusion Model tailored for generating high-quality histopathology images. Leveraging the rich contextual information provided by pathology text reports, our approach fuses image and textual data to enhance the generation process. By utilizing GPT's capabilities to distill and summarize complex text reports, we establish an effective conditioning mechanism. Through strategic conditioning and necessary architectural enhancements, we achieved a SoTA FID score of 7.64 for text-to-image generation on the TCGA-BRCA dataset, significantly outperforming the closest text-conditioned competitor with FID 30.1.