High-Order Correlation-Guided Slide-Level Histology Retrieval With Self-Supervised Hashing

IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell. 2023 Sep;45(9):11008-11023. doi: 10.1109/TPAMI.2023.3269810. Epub 2023 Aug 7.

Abstract

Histopathological Whole Slide Images (WSIs) play a crucial role in cancer diagnosis. It is of significant importance for pathologists to search for images sharing similar content with the query WSI, especially in the case-based diagnosis. While slide-level retrieval could be more intuitive and practical in clinical applications, most methods are designed for patch-level retrieval. A few recently unsupervised slide-level methods only focus on integrating patch features directly, without perceiving slide-level information, and thus severely limits the performance of WSI retrieval. To tackle the issue, we propose a High-Order Correlation-Guided Self-Supervised Hashing-Encoding Retrieval (HSHR) method. Specifically, we train an attention-based hash encoder with slide-level representation in a self-supervised manner, enabling it to generate more representative slide-level hash codes of cluster centers and assign weights for each. These optimized and weighted codes are leveraged to establish a similarity-based hypergraph, in which a hypergraph-guided retrieval module is adopted to explore high-order correlations in the multi-pairwise manifold to conduct WSI retrieval. Extensive experiments on multiple TCGA datasets with over 24,000 WSIs spanning 30 cancer subtypes demonstrate that HSHR achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with other unsupervised histology WSI retrieval methods.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Cluster Analysis
  • Datasets as Topic
  • Histology*
  • Humans
  • Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / methods
  • Neoplasms / classification
  • Neoplasms / diagnosis
  • Neoplasms / pathology
  • Pathology / methods
  • Pattern Recognition, Automated* / methods
  • Supervised Machine Learning*
  • Unsupervised Machine Learning