Domain-specific optimization and diverse evaluation of self-supervised models for histopathology
This work addresses data scarcity in histopathology for improving diagnosis and precision medicine, but it is incremental as it builds on existing self-supervised methods with domain-specific optimizations.
The authors tackled the problem of limited high-quality data for developing task-specific deep learning models in histopathology by creating and evaluating foundation models using self-supervised learning, achieving improved performance across diverse benchmark tasks involving 17 tissue types and 12 cancer types.
Task-specific deep learning models in histopathology offer promising opportunities for improving diagnosis, clinical research, and precision medicine. However, development of such models is often limited by availability of high-quality data. Foundation models in histopathology that learn general representations across a wide range of tissue types, diagnoses, and magnifications offer the potential to reduce the data, compute, and technical expertise necessary to develop task-specific deep learning models with the required level of model performance. In this work, we describe the development and evaluation of foundation models for histopathology via self-supervised learning (SSL). We first establish a diverse set of benchmark tasks involving 17 unique tissue types and 12 unique cancer types and spanning different optimal magnifications and task types. Next, we use this benchmark to explore and evaluate histopathology-specific SSL methods followed by further evaluation on held out patch-level and weakly supervised tasks. We found that standard SSL methods thoughtfully applied to histopathology images are performant across our benchmark tasks and that domain-specific methodological improvements can further increase performance. Our findings reinforce the value of using domain-specific SSL methods in pathology, and establish a set of high quality foundation models to enable further research across diverse applications.