Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Pothagoni, Shrunal, Schweinhart, Benjamin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14378
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917310994841600
author Pothagoni, Shrunal
Schweinhart, Benjamin
author_facet Pothagoni, Shrunal
Schweinhart, Benjamin
contents Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are a standard tool for computer vision tasks such as image classification. However, typical model architectures may result in the loss of topological information. In specific domains such as histopathology, topology is an important descriptor that can be used to distinguish between disease-indicating tissue by analyzing the shape characteristics of cells. Current literature suggests that reintroducing topological information using persistent homology can improve medical diagnostics; however, previous methods utilize global topological summaries which do not contain information about the locality of topological features. To address this gap, we present a novel method that generates local persistent homology-based data using a modified version of the convolution operator called \textit{Persistent Homology Convolutions}. This method captures information about the locality and translation equivariance of topological features. We perform a comparative study using various representations of histopathology slides and find that models trained with persistent homology convolutions outperform conventionally trained models and are less sensitive to hyperparameters. These results indicate that persistent homology convolutions extract meaningful geometric information from the histopathology slides.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_14378
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Classification of Histopathology Slides with Persistent Homology Convolutions
Pothagoni, Shrunal
Schweinhart, Benjamin
Image and Video Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are a standard tool for computer vision tasks such as image classification. However, typical model architectures may result in the loss of topological information. In specific domains such as histopathology, topology is an important descriptor that can be used to distinguish between disease-indicating tissue by analyzing the shape characteristics of cells. Current literature suggests that reintroducing topological information using persistent homology can improve medical diagnostics; however, previous methods utilize global topological summaries which do not contain information about the locality of topological features. To address this gap, we present a novel method that generates local persistent homology-based data using a modified version of the convolution operator called \textit{Persistent Homology Convolutions}. This method captures information about the locality and translation equivariance of topological features. We perform a comparative study using various representations of histopathology slides and find that models trained with persistent homology convolutions outperform conventionally trained models and are less sensitive to hyperparameters. These results indicate that persistent homology convolutions extract meaningful geometric information from the histopathology slides.
title Classification of Histopathology Slides with Persistent Homology Convolutions
topic Image and Video Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14378