A Multicentric Dataset for Training and Benchmarking Breast Cancer Segmentation in H&E Slides

Automated semantic segmentation of whole-slide images (WSIs) stained with hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) is essential for large-scale artificial intelligence-based biomarker analysis in breast cancer. However, existing public datasets for breast cancer segmentation lack the morphological diversity needed to support model generalizability and robust biomarker validation across heterogeneous patient cohorts. We introduce BrEast cancEr hisTopathoLogy sEgmentation (BEETLE), a dataset for multiclass semantic segmentation of H&E-stained breast cancer WSIs. It consists of 587 biopsies and resections from three collaborating clinical centers and two public datasets, digitized using seven scanners, and covers all molecular subtypes and histological grades. Using diverse annotation strategies, we collected annotations across four classes - invasive epithelium, non-invasive epithelium, necrosis, and other - with particular focus on morphologies underrepresented in existing datasets, such as ductal carcinoma in situ and dispersed lobular tumor cells. The dataset's diversity and relevance to the rapidly growing field of automated biomarker quantification in breast cancer ensure its high potential for reuse. Finally, we provide a well-curated, multicentric external evaluation set to enable standardized benchmarking of breast cancer segmentation models.

Benchmarking Hierarchical Image Pyramid Transformer for the classification of colon biopsies and polyps in histopathology images

Training neural networks with high-quality pixel-level annotation in histopathology whole-slide images (WSI) is an expensive process due to gigapixel resolution of WSIs. However, recent advances in self-supervised learning have shown that highly descriptive image representations can be learned without the need for annotations. We investigate the application of the recent Hierarchical Image Pyramid Transformer (HIPT) model for the specific task of classification of colorectal biopsies and polyps. After evaluating the effectiveness of TCGA-learned features in the original HIPT model, we incorporate colon biopsy image information into HIPT's pretraining using two distinct strategies: (1) fine-tuning HIPT from the existing TCGA weights and (2) pretraining HIPT from random weight initialization. We compare the performance of these pretraining regimes on two colorectal biopsy classification tasks: binary and multiclass classification.