Cell Graph Transformer for Nuclei Classification

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Lou, Wei, Li, Guanbin, Wan, Xiang, Li, Haofeng
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Lou, Wei
Li, Guanbin
Wan, Xiang
Li, Haofeng
author_facet Lou, Wei
Li, Guanbin
Wan, Xiang
Li, Haofeng
contents Nuclei classification is a critical step in computer-aided diagnosis with histopathology images. In the past, various methods have employed graph neural networks (GNN) to analyze cell graphs that model inter-cell relationships by considering nuclei as vertices. However, they are limited by the GNN mechanism that only passes messages among local nodes via fixed edges. To address the issue, we develop a cell graph transformer (CGT) that treats nodes and edges as input tokens to enable learnable adjacency and information exchange among all nodes. Nevertheless, training the transformer with a cell graph presents another challenge. Poorly initialized features can lead to noisy self-attention scores and inferior convergence, particularly when processing the cell graphs with numerous connections. Thus, we further propose a novel topology-aware pretraining method that leverages a graph convolutional network (GCN) to learn a feature extractor. The pre-trained features may suppress unreasonable correlations and hence ease the finetuning of CGT. Experimental results suggest that the proposed cell graph transformer with topology-aware pretraining significantly improves the nuclei classification results, and achieves the state-of-the-art performance. Code and models are available at https://github.com/lhaof/CGT
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_12946
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Cell Graph Transformer for Nuclei Classification
Lou, Wei
Li, Guanbin
Wan, Xiang
Li, Haofeng
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Nuclei classification is a critical step in computer-aided diagnosis with histopathology images. In the past, various methods have employed graph neural networks (GNN) to analyze cell graphs that model inter-cell relationships by considering nuclei as vertices. However, they are limited by the GNN mechanism that only passes messages among local nodes via fixed edges. To address the issue, we develop a cell graph transformer (CGT) that treats nodes and edges as input tokens to enable learnable adjacency and information exchange among all nodes. Nevertheless, training the transformer with a cell graph presents another challenge. Poorly initialized features can lead to noisy self-attention scores and inferior convergence, particularly when processing the cell graphs with numerous connections. Thus, we further propose a novel topology-aware pretraining method that leverages a graph convolutional network (GCN) to learn a feature extractor. The pre-trained features may suppress unreasonable correlations and hence ease the finetuning of CGT. Experimental results suggest that the proposed cell graph transformer with topology-aware pretraining significantly improves the nuclei classification results, and achieves the state-of-the-art performance. Code and models are available at https://github.com/lhaof/CGT
title Cell Graph Transformer for Nuclei Classification
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.12946