A Self-Training Weakly-Supervised Framework for Pathologist-Like Histopathological Image Analysis

Abstract

The advent of artificial intelligence-based tools applied to digital pathology brings the promise of reduced workload for pathologists and enhanced patient care, not to mention medical research progress. Yet, despite its great potential, the field is hindered by the paucity of annotated histological data, a limitation for developing robust deep learning models. To reduce the number of expert annotations needed for training, we introduce a novel framework combining self-training and weakly-supervised learning that uses both annotated and unannotated data samples. Inspired by how pathologists examine biopsies, our method considers whole slide images from a bird’s eye view to roughly localize the tumor area before focusing on its features at a higher magnification level. Notwithstanding the scarcity of the dataset, the experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms models trained with annotated data only and previous works analyzing the same type of lesions, thus demonstrating the efficiency of the approach.