Self-similarity Student for Partial Label Histopathology Image Segmentation

Delineation of cancerous regions in gigapixel whole slide images (WSIs) is a crucial diagnostic procedure in digital pathology. This process is time-consuming because of the large search space in the gigapixel WSIs, causing chances of omission and misinterpretation at indistinct tumor lesions. To tackle this, the development of an automated cancerous region segmentation method is imperative. We frame this issue as a modeling problem with partial label WSIs, where some cancerous regions may be misclassified as benign and vice versa, producing patches with noisy labels. To learn from these patches, we propose Self-similarity Student, combining teacher-student model paradigm with similarity learning. Specifically, for each patch, we first sample its similar and dissimilar patches according to spatial distance. A teacher-student model is then introduced, featuring the exponential moving average on both student model weights and teacher predictions ensemble. While our student model takes patches, teacher model takes all their corresponding similar and dissimilar patches for learning robust representation against noisy label patches. Following this similarity learning, our similarity ensemble merges similar patches' ensembled predictions as the pseudo-label of a given patch to counteract its noisy label. On the CAMELYON16 dataset, our method substantially outperforms state-of-the-art noise-aware learning methods by 5$\%$ and the supervised-trained baseline by 10$\%$ in various degrees of noise. Moreover, our method is superior to the baseline on our TVGH TURP dataset with 2$\%$ improvement, demonstrating the generalizability to more clinical histopathology segmentation tasks.

A Cascaded Learning Strategy for Robust COVID-19 Pneumonia Chest X-Ray Screening

We introduce a comprehensive screening platform for the COVID-19 (a.k.a., SARS-CoV-2) pneumonia. The proposed AI-based system works on chest x-ray (CXR) images to predict whether a patient is infected with the COVID-19 disease. Although the recent international joint effort on making the availability of all sorts of open data, the public collection of CXR images is still relatively small for reliably training a deep neural network (DNN) to carry out COVID-19 prediction. To better address such inefficiency, we design a cascaded learning strategy to improve both the sensitivity and the specificity of the resulting DNN classification model. Our approach leverages a large CXR image dataset of non-COVID-19 pneumonia to generalize the original well-trained classification model via a cascaded learning scheme. The resulting screening system is shown to achieve good classification performance on the expanded dataset, including those newly added COVID-19 CXR images.