背景:肾小球病变反映了肾脏疾病的发生和进展。病理诊断被广泛认为是识别这些病变的最终方法,组织病理学结构的偏差与肾功能受损密切相关。
方法:深度学习在简化繁琐的工作中起着至关重要的作用,具有挑战性,以及病理学家识别肾小球病变的主观任务。然而,当前的方法将病理图像视为规则欧几里得空间中的数据,限制了他们有效地表示复杂的局部特征和全局连接的能力。为了应对这一挑战,本文提出了一种图神经网络(GNN),利用全局注意力池(GAP)更有效地从肾小球图像中提取高级语义特征。该模型结合了贝叶斯协作学习(BCL),增强节点特征在训练过程中进行微调和融合。此外,本文增加了一个软分类头,以减轻与纯硬分类相关的语义歧义。
结果:本文对四个肾小球数据集进行了广泛的实验,包括总共491个完整的幻灯片图像(WSI)和9030个图像。结果表明,该模型取得了81.37%的令人印象深刻的F1成绩,90.12%,87.72%,和98.68%在四个私有数据集上用于肾小球病变识别。这些分数超过了用于比较的其他模型的性能。此外,本文采用公开可用的BReAst癌亚型(BRACS)数据集,F1评分为85.61%,以进一步证明所提出模型的优越性。
结论:所提出的模型不仅有助于肾小球病变的精确识别,而且是有效诊断肾脏疾病的有力工具。此外,GNN的框架和训练方法可以巧妙地应用于解决各种病理图像分类挑战。
BACKGROUND: Glomerular lesions reflect the onset and progression of renal disease. Pathological diagnoses are widely regarded as the definitive method for recognizing these lesions, as the deviations in histopathological structures closely correlate with impairments in renal function.
METHODS: Deep learning plays a crucial role in streamlining the laborious, challenging, and subjective task of recognizing glomerular lesions by pathologists. However, the current methods treat pathology images as data in regular Euclidean space, limiting their ability to efficiently represent the complex local features and global connections. In response to this challenge, this paper proposes a graph neural network (GNN) that utilizes global attention pooling (GAP) to more effectively extract high-level semantic features from glomerular images. The model incorporates Bayesian collaborative learning (BCL), enhancing node feature fine-tuning and fusion during training. In addition, this paper adds a soft classification head to mitigate the semantic ambiguity associated with a purely hard classification.
RESULTS: This paper conducted extensive experiments on four glomerular datasets, comprising a total of 491 whole slide images (WSIs) and 9030 images. The results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves impressive F1 scores of 81.37%, 90.12%, 87.72%, and 98.68% on four private datasets for glomerular lesion recognition. These scores surpass the performance of the other models used for comparison. Furthermore, this paper employed a publicly available BReAst Carcinoma Subtyping (BRACS) dataset with an 85.61% F1 score to further prove the superiority of the proposed model.
CONCLUSIONS: The proposed model not only facilitates precise recognition of glomerular lesions but also serves as a potent tool for diagnosing kidney diseases effectively. Furthermore, the framework and training methodology of the GNN can be adeptly applied to address various pathology image classification challenges.