The classification of gigapixel histopathology images with deep multiple instance learning models has become a critical task in digital pathology and precision medicine. In this work, we propose a Transformer-based multiple instance learning approach that replaces the traditional learned attention mechanism with a regional, Vision Transformer inspired self-attention mechanism. We present a method that fuses regional patch information to derive slide-level predictions and show how this regional aggregation can be stacked to hierarchically process features on different distance levels. To increase predictive accuracy, especially for datasets with small, local morphological features, we introduce a method to focus the image processing on high attention regions during inference. Our approach is able to significantly improve performance over the baseline on two histopathology datasets and points towards promising directions for further research.

我们提出了一种基于Transformer的多例学习方法，用区域视觉Transformer自注意机制替代传统的学习注意机制，通过融合区域块信息来预测整张幻灯片，并展示了如何在不同距离级别上分层处理特征。为了提高预测准确性，尤其是对于具有小区域形态特征的数据集，我们介绍了一种在推断期间将图像处理集中于高注意区域的方法。我们的方法能够显著提高两个组织病理学数据集上的性能，并指出了进一步研究的有希望的方向。

基于分层区域的多实例学习中的Transformer