Histopathology serves as the gold standard in cancer diagnosis, with clinical reports being vital in interpreting and understanding this process, guiding cancer treatment and patient care. The automation of histopathology report generation with deep learning stands to significantly enhance clinical efficiency and lessen the labor-intensive, time-consuming burden on pathologists in report writing. In pursuit of this advancement, we introduce HistGen, a multiple instance learning-empowered framework for histopathology report generation together with the first benchmark dataset for evaluation. Inspired by diagnostic and report-writing workflows, HistGen features two delicately designed modules, aiming to boost report generation by aligning whole slide images (WSIs) and diagnostic reports from local and global granularity. To achieve this, a local-global hierarchical encoder is developed for efficient visual feature aggregation from a region-to-slide perspective. Meanwhile, a cross-modal context module is proposed to explicitly facilitate alignment and interaction between distinct modalities, effectively bridging the gap between the extensive visual sequences of WSIs and corresponding highly summarized reports. Experimental results on WSI report generation show the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) models by a large margin. Moreover, the results of fine-tuning our model on cancer subtyping and survival analysis tasks further demonstrate superior performance compared to SOTA methods, showcasing strong transfer learning capability. Dataset, model weights, and source code are available in https://github.com/dddavid4real/HistGen.

通过本研究，我们首次引入HistGen，一个采用多实例学习的框架用于组织病理学报告生成，并提供了用于评估的基准数据集。该模型通过两个精心设计的模块来提高报告生成的效率，从而加强了临床效果。实验结果表明该模型在报告生成方面表现优于现有最先进模型，并且在癌症亚型和生存分析任务上的微调表明具有很强的迁移学习能力。

HistGen: 通过局部-全局特征编码和跨模态上下文交互实现的组织病理报告生成