While high-resolution pathology images lend themselves well to `data hungry' deep learning algorithms, obtaining exhaustive annotations on these images is a major challenge. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised CNN approach to leverage unlabeled data for learning generalizable and domain invariant representations in pathology images. The proposed approach, which we term as Self-Path, is a multi-task learning approach where the main task is tissue classification and pretext tasks are a variety of self-supervised tasks with labels inherent to the input data. We introduce novel domain specific self-supervision tasks that leverage contextual, multi-resolution and semantic features in pathology images for semi-supervised learning and domain adaptation. We investigate the effectiveness of Self-Path on 3 different pathology datasets. Our results show that Self-Path with the domain-specific pretext tasks achieves state-of-the-art performance for semi-supervised learning when small amounts of labeled data are available. Further, we show that Self-Path improves domain adaptation for classification of histology image patches when there is no labeled data available for the target domain. This approach can potentially be employed for other applications in computational pathology, where annotation budget is often limited or large amount of unlabeled image data is available.

本文提出了一种自我监督的深度学习算法，采用CNN实现对病理图像的多任务分类，并结合具有内在标签的预处理任务来实现半监督学习和领域自适应。实验结果表明该算法在病理学图像分类任务中具有较高的性能表现，并能够适用于其他计算病理学应用领域中。

自路径: 有限标注病理图像分类的自监督学习