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Main Authors: Perkonigg, Matthias, Rockenschaub, Patrick, Göbel, Georg, Wöhrer, Adelheid
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02760
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author Perkonigg, Matthias
Rockenschaub, Patrick
Göbel, Georg
Wöhrer, Adelheid
author_facet Perkonigg, Matthias
Rockenschaub, Patrick
Göbel, Georg
Wöhrer, Adelheid
contents Accurate brain tumor classification is critical for intra-operative decision making in neuro-oncological surgery. However, existing approaches are restricted to a fixed set of predefined classes and are therefore unable to capture patterns of tumor types not available during training. Unsupervised learning can extract general-purpose features, but it lacks the ability to incorporate prior knowledge from labelled data, and semi-supervised methods often assume that all potential classes are represented in the labelled data. Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) aims to bridge this gap by categorizing both known and unknown classes within unlabelled data. To reflect the hierarchical structure of brain tumor taxonomies, in this work, we introduce Hierarchical Generalized Category Discovery for Brain Tumor Classification (HGCD-BT), a novel approach that integrates hierarchical clustering with contrastive learning. Our method extends contrastive learning based GCD by incorporating a novel semi-supervised hierarchical clustering loss. We evaluate HGCD-BT on OpenSRH, a dataset of stimulated Raman histology brain tumor images, achieving a +28% improvement in accuracy over state-of-the-art GCD methods for patch-level classification, particularly in identifying previously unseen tumor categories. Furthermore, we demonstrate the generalizability of HGCD-BT on slide-level classification of hematoxylin and eosin stained whole-slide images from the Digital Brain Tumor Atlas, confirming its utility across imaging modalities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_02760
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hierarchical Generalized Category Discovery for Brain Tumor Classification in Digital Pathology
Perkonigg, Matthias
Rockenschaub, Patrick
Göbel, Georg
Wöhrer, Adelheid
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Accurate brain tumor classification is critical for intra-operative decision making in neuro-oncological surgery. However, existing approaches are restricted to a fixed set of predefined classes and are therefore unable to capture patterns of tumor types not available during training. Unsupervised learning can extract general-purpose features, but it lacks the ability to incorporate prior knowledge from labelled data, and semi-supervised methods often assume that all potential classes are represented in the labelled data. Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) aims to bridge this gap by categorizing both known and unknown classes within unlabelled data. To reflect the hierarchical structure of brain tumor taxonomies, in this work, we introduce Hierarchical Generalized Category Discovery for Brain Tumor Classification (HGCD-BT), a novel approach that integrates hierarchical clustering with contrastive learning. Our method extends contrastive learning based GCD by incorporating a novel semi-supervised hierarchical clustering loss. We evaluate HGCD-BT on OpenSRH, a dataset of stimulated Raman histology brain tumor images, achieving a +28% improvement in accuracy over state-of-the-art GCD methods for patch-level classification, particularly in identifying previously unseen tumor categories. Furthermore, we demonstrate the generalizability of HGCD-BT on slide-level classification of hematoxylin and eosin stained whole-slide images from the Digital Brain Tumor Atlas, confirming its utility across imaging modalities.
title Hierarchical Generalized Category Discovery for Brain Tumor Classification in Digital Pathology
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02760