Cross-Domain Evaluation of Few-Shot Classification Models: Natural Images vs. Histopathological Images

In this study, we investigate the performance of few-shot classification models across different domains, specifically natural images and histopathological images. We first train several few-shot classification models on natural images and evaluate their performance on histopathological images. Subsequently, we train the same models on histopathological images and compare their performance. We incorporated four histopathology datasets and one natural images dataset and assessed performance across 5-way 1-shot, 5-way 5-shot, and 5-way 10-shot scenarios using a selection of state-of-the-art classification techniques. Our experimental results reveal insights into the transferability and generalization capabilities of few-shot classification models between diverse image domains. We analyze the strengths and limitations of these models in adapting to new domains and provide recommendations for optimizing their performance in cross-domain scenarios. This research contributes to advancing our understanding of few-shot learning in the context of image classification across diverse domains.

HER2 and FISH Status Prediction in Breast Biopsy H&E-Stained Images Using Deep Learning

The current standard for detecting human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) status in breast cancer patients relies on HER2 amplification, identified through fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) or immunohistochemistry (IHC). However, hematoxylin and eosin (H\&E) tumor stains are more widely available, and accurately predicting HER2 status using H\&E could reduce costs and expedite treatment selection. Deep Learning algorithms for H&E have shown effectiveness in predicting various cancer features and clinical outcomes, including moderate success in HER2 status prediction. In this work, we employed a customized weak supervision classification technique combined with MoCo-v2 contrastive learning to predict HER2 status. We trained our pipeline on 182 publicly available H&E Whole Slide Images (WSIs) from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), for which annotations by the pathology team at Yale School of Medicine are publicly available. Our pipeline achieved an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 0.85 across four different test folds. Additionally, we tested our model on 44 H&E slides from the TCGA-BRCA dataset, which had an HER2 score of 2+ and included corresponding HER2 status and FISH test results. These cases are considered equivocal for IHC, requiring an expensive FISH test on their IHC slides for disambiguation. Our pipeline demonstrated an AUC of 0.81 on these challenging H&E slides. Reducing the need for FISH test can have significant implications in cancer treatment equity for underserved populations.

Few-Shot Histopathology Image Classification: Evaluating State-of-the-Art Methods and Unveiling Performance Insights

This paper presents a study on few-shot classification in the context of histopathology images. While few-shot learning has been studied for natural image classification, its application to histopathology is relatively unexplored. Given the scarcity of labeled data in medical imaging and the inherent challenges posed by diverse tissue types and data preparation techniques, this research evaluates the performance of state-of-the-art few-shot learning methods for various scenarios on histology data. We have considered four histopathology datasets for few-shot histopathology image classification and have evaluated 5-way 1-shot, 5-way 5-shot and 5-way 10-shot scenarios with a set of state-of-the-art classification techniques. The best methods have surpassed an accuracy of 70%, 80% and 85% in the cases of 5-way 1-shot, 5-way 5-shot and 5-way 10-shot cases, respectively. We found that for histology images popular meta-learning approaches is at par with standard fine-tuning and regularization methods. Our experiments underscore the challenges of working with images from different domains and underscore the significance of unbiased and focused evaluations in advancing computer vision techniques for specialized domains, such as histology images.

IFSENet : Harnessing Sparse Iterations for Interactive Few-shot Segmentation Excellence

Training a computer vision system to segment a novel class typically requires collecting and painstakingly annotating lots of images with objects from that class. Few-shot segmentation techniques reduce the required number of images to learn to segment a new class, but careful annotations of object boundaries are still required. On the other hand, interactive segmentation techniques only focus on incrementally improving the segmentation of one object at a time (typically, using clicks given by an expert) in a class-agnostic manner. We combine the two concepts to drastically reduce the effort required to train segmentation models for novel classes. Instead of trivially feeding interactive segmentation masks as ground truth to a few-shot segmentation model, we propose IFSENet, which can accept sparse supervision on a single or few support images in the form of clicks to generate masks on support (training, at least clicked upon once) as well as query (test, never clicked upon) images. To trade-off effort for accuracy flexibly, the number of images and clicks can be incrementally added to the support set to further improve the segmentation of support as well as query images. The proposed model approaches the accuracy of previous state-of-the-art few-shot segmentation models with considerably lower annotation effort (clicks instead of maps), when tested on Pascal and SBD datasets on query images. It also works well as an interactive segmentation method on support images.