Weakly supervised segmentation on neural compressed histopathology with self-equivariant regularization

In digital pathology, segmentation is a fundamental task for the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. Existing fully supervised methods often require accurate pixel-level annotations that are both time-consuming and laborious to generate. Typical approaches first pre-process histology images into patches to meet memory constraints and later perform stitching for segmentation; at times leading to lower performance given the lack of global context. Since image level labels are cheaper to acquire, weakly supervised learning is a more practical alternative for training segmentation algorithms. In this work, we present a weakly supervised framework for histopathology segmentation using only image-level labels by refining class activation maps (CAM) with self-supervision. First, we compress gigapixel histology images with an unsupervised contrastive learning technique to retain high-level spatial context. Second, a network is trained on the compressed images to jointly predict image-labels and refine the initial CAMs via self-supervised losses. In particular, we achieve refinement via a pixel correlation module (PCM) that leverages self-attention between the initial CAM and the input to encourage fine-grained activations. Also, we introduce a feature masking technique that performs spatial dropout on the compressed input to suppress low confidence predictions. To effectively train our model, we propose a loss function that includes a classification objective with image-labels, self-supervised regularization and entropy minimization between the CAM predictions. Experimental results on two curated datasets show that our approach is comparable to fully-supervised methods and can outperform existing state-of-the-art patch-based methods. https://github.com/PhilipChicco/wsshisto