Abstract:Cellular nuclei recognition serves as a fundamental and essential step in the workflow of digital pathology. However, with disparate source organs and staining procedures among histology image clusters, the scanned tiles inherently conform to a non-uniform data distribution, which induces deteriorated promises for general cross-cohort usages. Despite the latest efforts leveraging domain adaptation to mitigate distributional discrepancy, those methods are subjected to modeling the morphological characteristics of each cell individually, disregarding the hierarchical latent structure and intrinsic contextual correspondences across the tumor micro-environment. In this work, we identify the importance of implicit correspondences across biological contexts for exploiting domain-invariant pathological composition and thereby propose to exploit the dependence over various biological structures for domain adaptive cellular recognition. We discover those high-level correspondences via unsupervised contextual modeling and use them as bridges to facilitate adaptation over diverse organs and stains. In addition, to further exploit the rich spatial contexts embedded amongst nuclear communities, we propose self-adaptive dynamic distillation to secure instance-aware trade-offs across different model constituents. The proposed method is extensively evaluated on a broad spectrum of cross-domain settings under miscellaneous data distribution shifts and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a substantial margin. Code is available at https://github.com/camwew/CellularRecognition_DA_CC.
Abstract:Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods have been broadly utilized to improve the models' adaptation ability in general computer vision. However, different from the natural images, there exist huge semantic gaps for the nuclei from different categories in histopathology images. It is still under-explored how could we build generalized UDA models for precise segmentation or classification of nuclei instances across different datasets. In this work, we propose a novel deep neural network, namely Category-Aware feature alignment and Pseudo-Labelling Network (CAPL-Net) for UDA nuclei instance segmentation and classification. Specifically, we first propose a category-level feature alignment module with dynamic learnable trade-off weights. Second, we propose to facilitate the model performance on the target data via self-supervised training with pseudo labels based on nuclei-level prototype features. Comprehensive experiments on cross-domain nuclei instance segmentation and classification tasks demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art UDA methods with a remarkable margin.