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Main Authors: She, Chengying, Chen, Chengwei, Fan, Dongjie, Liu, Lizhuang, Shao, Chengwei, Bian, Yun, Wang, Ben, Zhang, Xinran
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23640
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author She, Chengying
Chen, Chengwei
Fan, Dongjie
Liu, Lizhuang
Shao, Chengwei
Bian, Yun
Wang, Ben
Zhang, Xinran
author_facet She, Chengying
Chen, Chengwei
Fan, Dongjie
Liu, Lizhuang
Shao, Chengwei
Bian, Yun
Wang, Ben
Zhang, Xinran
contents Whole slide images (WSIs) classification represents a fundamental challenge in computational pathology, where multiple instance learning (MIL) has emerged as the dominant paradigm. Current state-of-the-art (SOTA) MIL methods rely on attention mechanisms, achieving good performance but requiring substantial computational resources due to quadratic complexity when processing hundreds of thousands of patches. To address this computational bottleneck, we introduce EfficientMIL, a novel linear-complexity MIL approach for WSIs classification with the patches selection module Adaptive Patch Selector (APS) that we designed, replacing the quadratic-complexity self-attention mechanisms in Transformer-based MIL methods with efficient sequence models including RNN-based GRU, LSTM, and State Space Model (SSM) Mamba. EfficientMIL achieves significant computational efficiency improvements while outperforming other MIL methods across multiple histopathology datasets. On TCGA-Lung dataset, EfficientMIL-Mamba achieved AUC of 0.976 and accuracy of 0.933, while on CAMELYON16 dataset, EfficientMIL-GRU achieved AUC of 0.990 and accuracy of 0.975, surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that APS is also more effective for patches selection than conventional selection strategies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_23640
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle EfficientMIL: Efficient Linear-Complexity MIL Method for WSI Classification
She, Chengying
Chen, Chengwei
Fan, Dongjie
Liu, Lizhuang
Shao, Chengwei
Bian, Yun
Wang, Ben
Zhang, Xinran
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Whole slide images (WSIs) classification represents a fundamental challenge in computational pathology, where multiple instance learning (MIL) has emerged as the dominant paradigm. Current state-of-the-art (SOTA) MIL methods rely on attention mechanisms, achieving good performance but requiring substantial computational resources due to quadratic complexity when processing hundreds of thousands of patches. To address this computational bottleneck, we introduce EfficientMIL, a novel linear-complexity MIL approach for WSIs classification with the patches selection module Adaptive Patch Selector (APS) that we designed, replacing the quadratic-complexity self-attention mechanisms in Transformer-based MIL methods with efficient sequence models including RNN-based GRU, LSTM, and State Space Model (SSM) Mamba. EfficientMIL achieves significant computational efficiency improvements while outperforming other MIL methods across multiple histopathology datasets. On TCGA-Lung dataset, EfficientMIL-Mamba achieved AUC of 0.976 and accuracy of 0.933, while on CAMELYON16 dataset, EfficientMIL-GRU achieved AUC of 0.990 and accuracy of 0.975, surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that APS is also more effective for patches selection than conventional selection strategies.
title EfficientMIL: Efficient Linear-Complexity MIL Method for WSI Classification
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23640