In this paper, we develop a new weakly-supervised learning algorithm to learn to segment cancerous regions in histopathology images. Our work is under a multiple instance learning framework (MIL) with a new formulation, deep weak supervision (DWS); we also propose an effective way to introduce constraints to our neural networks to assist the learning process. The contributions of our algorithm are threefold: (1) We build an end-to-end learning system that segments cancerous regions with fully convolutional networks (FCN) in which image-to-image weakly-supervised learning is performed. (2) We develop a deep week supervision formulation to exploit multi-scale learning under weak supervision within fully convolutional networks. (3) Constraints about positive instances are introduced in our approach to effectively explore additional weakly-supervised information that is easy to obtain and enjoys a significant boost to the learning process. The proposed algorithm, abbreviated as DWS-MIL, is easy to implement and can be trained efficiently. Our system demonstrates state-of-the-art results on large-scale histopathology image datasets and can be applied to various applications in medical imaging beyond histopathology images such as MRI, CT, and ultrasound images.

本文提出了一种新的弱监督学习算法，命名为DWS-MIL，用于学习在组织病理学图像中分割癌症区域，该算法集成了全卷积网络、多尺度学习和正实例约束等技术，通过图像弱监督传递的信息完成分割任务，并在医学图像处理领域取得了最优结果。

组织病理学图像分割的受限深度弱监督