Exploiting Geometric Features via Hierarchical Graph Pyramid Transformer for Cancer Diagnosis using Histopathological Images

Cancer is widely recognized as the primary cause of mortality worldwide, and pathology analysis plays a pivotal role in achieving accurate cancer diagnosis. The intricate representation of features in histopathological images encompasses abundant information crucial for disease diagnosis, regarding cell appearance, tumor microenvironment, and geometric characteristics. However, recent deep learning methods have not adequately exploited geometric features for pathological image classification due to the absence of effective descriptors that can capture both cell distribution and gathering patterns, which often serve as potent indicators. In this paper, inspired by clinical practice, a Hierarchical Graph Pyramid Transformer (HGPT) is proposed to guide pathological image classification by effectively exploiting a geometric representation of tissue distribution which was ignored by existing state-of-the-art methods. First, a graph representation is constructed according to morphological feature of input pathological image and learn geometric representation through the proposed multi-head graph aggregator. Then, the image and its graph representation are feed into the transformer encoder layer to model long-range dependency. Finally, a locality feature enhancement block is designed to enhance the 2D local representation of feature embedding, which is not well explored in the existing vision transformers. An extensive experimental study is conducted on Kather-5K, MHIST, NCT-CRC-HE, and GasHisSDB for binary or multi-category classification of multiple cancer types. Results demonstrated that our method is capable of consistently reaching superior classification outcomes for histopathological images, which provide an effective diagnostic tool for malignant tumors in clinical practice.

Medienart:

E-Artikel

Erscheinungsjahr:

2024

Erschienen:

2024

Enthalten in:

Zur Gesamtaufnahme - volume:PP

Enthalten in:

IEEE transactions on medical imaging - PP(2024) vom: 26. März

Sprache:

Englisch

Beteiligte Personen:

Liu, Mingxin [VerfasserIn]
Liu, Yunzan [VerfasserIn]
Xu, Pengbo [VerfasserIn]
Cui, Hui [VerfasserIn]
Ke, Jing [VerfasserIn]
Ma, Jiquan [VerfasserIn]

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Volltext

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Journal Article

Anmerkungen:

Date Revised 26.03.2024

published: Print-Electronic

Citation Status Publisher

doi:

10.1109/TMI.2024.3381994

funding:

Förderinstitution / Projekttitel:

PPN (Katalog-ID):

NLM370202708