RankMix: Data Augmentation for Weakly Supervised Learning of Classifying Whole Slide Images with Diverse Sizes and Imbalanced Categories

Whole Slide Images (WSIs) are usually gigapixel in size and lack pixel-level annotations. The WSI datasets are also imbalanced in categories. These unique characteristics, significantly different from the ones in natural images, pose the challenge of classifying WSI images as a kind of weakly supervise learning problems. In this study, we propose, RankMix, a data augmentation method of mixing ranked features in a pair of WSIs. RankMix introduces the concepts of pseudo labeling and ranking in order to extract key WSI regions in contributing to the WSI classification task. A two-stage training is further proposed to boost stable training and model performance. To our knowledge, the study of weakly supervised learning from the perspective of data augmentation to deal with the WSI classification problem that suffers from lack of training data and imbalance of categories is relatively un-explored.