Multi-modal Pathological Pre-training via Masked Autoencoders for Breast Cancer Diagnosis

Breast cancer (BC) is one of the most common cancers identified globally among women, which has become the leading cause of death. Multi-modal pathological images contain different information for BC diagnosis. Hematoxylin and eosin (H &E) staining images could reveal a considerable amount of microscopic anatomy. Immunohistochemical (IHC) staining images provide the evaluation of the expression of various biomarkers, such as the human epidermal growth factor receptor (HER2) hybridization. In this paper, we propose a multi-modal pre-training model via pathological images for BC diagnosis. The proposed pre-training model contains three modules: (1) the modal-fusion encoder, (2) the mixed attention, and (3) the modal-specific decoders. The pre-trained model could be performed on multiple relevant tasks (IHC Reconstruction and IHC classification). The experiments on two datasets (HEROHE Challenge and BCI Challenge) show state-of-the-art results.