Despite notable advancements, the integration of deep learning (DL) techniques into impactful clinical applications, particularly in the realm of digital histopathology, has been hindered by challenges associated with achieving robust generalization across diverse imaging domains and characteristics. Traditional mitigation strategies in this field such as data augmentation and stain color normalization have proven insufficient in addressing this limitation, necessitating the exploration of alternative methodologies. To this end, we propose a novel generative method for domain generalization in histopathology images. Our method employs a generative, self-supervised Vision Transformer to dynamically extract characteristics of image patches and seamlessly infuse them into the original images, thereby creating novel, synthetic images with diverse attributes. By enriching the dataset with such synthesized images, we aim to enhance its holistic nature, facilitating improved generalization of DL models to unseen domains. Extensive experiments conducted on two distinct histopathology datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, outperforming the state of the art substantially, on the Camelyon17-wilds challenge dataset (+2%) and on a second epithelium-stroma dataset (+26%). Furthermore, we emphasize our method's ability to readily scale with increasingly available unlabeled data samples and more complex, higher parametric architectures. Source code is available at https://github.com/sdoerrich97/vits-are-generative-models .

我们提出了一种新颖的生成方法用于组织病理学图像的领域泛化，通过使用一种生成的自监督视觉转换器从图像片段中提取特征，并将它们无缝地融合到原始图像中，从而创建具有不同属性的新颖的合成图像，丰富数据集，从而提高深度学习模型在未见领域中的泛化能力。

自监督视觉Transformer是可扩展的领域泛化生成模型