Whole slide imaging is fundamental to biomedical microscopy and computational pathology. However, whole slide images (WSIs) present a complex computer vision challenge due to their gigapixel size, diverse histopathologic features, spatial heterogeneity, and limited/absent data annotations. These challenges highlight that supervised training alone can result in suboptimal whole slide representations. Self-supervised representation learning can achieve high-quality WSI visual feature learning for downstream diagnostic tasks, such as cancer diagnosis or molecular genetic prediction. Here, we present a general self-supervised whole slide learning (S3L) framework for gigapixel-scale self-supervision of WSIs. S3L combines data transformation strategies from transformer-based vision and language modeling into a single unified framework to generate paired views for self-supervision. S3L leverages the inherent regional heterogeneity, histologic feature variability, and information redundancy within WSIs to learn high-quality whole-slide representations. We benchmark S3L visual representations on two diagnostic tasks for two biomedical microscopy modalities. S3L significantly outperforms WSI baselines for cancer diagnosis and genetic mutation prediction. Additionally, S3L achieves good performance using both in-domain and out-of-distribution patch encoders, demonstrating good flexibility and generalizability.

自我监督整个切片学习（S3L）框架可以通过利用整个切片的固有区域异质性、组织学特征变异性和信息冗余性来学习高质量的整个切片表示，用于癌症诊断和基因突变预测等诊断任务，并且在两种生物医学显微镜条件下显著优于基线模型。

自我监督学习全尺寸切片表示的框架