Combining Graph Neural Network and Mamba to Capture Local and Global Tissue Spatial Relationships in Whole Slide Images
This work addresses a critical bottleneck in computational pathology for researchers and clinicians by improving tile-level information aggregation in WSIs, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing GNN and transformer-based approaches.
The paper tackled the problem of aggregating spatial features from gigapixel whole slide images (WSIs) for predictions at the WSI level by combining a graph neural network (GNN) with a state space model (Mamba) to capture local and global relationships among tiles, demonstrating effectiveness in predicting progression-free survival for early-stage lung adenocarcinomas compared to state-of-the-art methods.
In computational pathology, extracting spatial features from gigapixel whole slide images (WSIs) is a fundamental task, but due to their large size, WSIs are typically segmented into smaller tiles. A critical aspect of this analysis is aggregating information from these tiles to make predictions at the WSI level. We introduce a model that combines a message-passing graph neural network (GNN) with a state space model (Mamba) to capture both local and global spatial relationships among the tiles in WSIs. The model's effectiveness was demonstrated in predicting progression-free survival among patients with early-stage lung adenocarcinomas (LUAD). We compared the model with other state-of-the-art methods for tile-level information aggregation in WSIs, including tile-level information summary statistics-based aggregation, multiple instance learning (MIL)-based aggregation, GNN-based aggregation, and GNN-transformer-based aggregation. Additional experiments showed the impact of different types of node features and different tile sampling strategies on the model performance. This work can be easily extended to any WSI-based analysis. Code: https://github.com/rina-ding/gat-mamba.