Histopathology image classification based on semantic correlation clustering domain adaptation

Abstract

Deep learning has been successfully applied to histopathology image classification tasks. However, the performance of deep models is data-driven, and the acquisition and annotation of pathological image samples are difficult, which limit the model's performance. Compared to whole slide images (WSI) of patients, histopathology image datasets of animal models are easier to acquire and annotate. Therefore, this paper proposes an unsupervised domain adaptation method based on semantic correlation clustering for histopathology image classification. The aim is to utilize Minmice model histopathology image dataset to achieve the classification and recognition of human WSIs. Firstly, the multi-scale fused features extracted from the source and target domains are normalized and mapped. In the new feature space, the cosine distance between class centers is used to measure the semantic correlation between categories. Then, the domain centers, class centers, and sample distributions are self-constrainedly aligned. Multi-granular information is applied to achieve cross-domain semantic correlation knowledge transfer between classes. Finally, the probabilistic heatmap is used to visualize the model's prediction results and annotate the cancerous regions in WSIs. Experimental results show that the proposed method has high classification accuracy for WSI, and the annotated result is close to manual annotation, indicating its potential for clinical applications.