DiffusionQC: Artifact Detection in Histopathology via Diffusion Model

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Wang, Zhenzhen, Zhou, Zhongliang, Wen, Zhuoyu, Kook, Jeong Hwan, Wojcik, John B, Kang, John
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Wang, Zhenzhen
Zhou, Zhongliang
Wen, Zhuoyu
Kook, Jeong Hwan
Wojcik, John B
Kang, John
author_facet Wang, Zhenzhen
Zhou, Zhongliang
Wen, Zhuoyu
Kook, Jeong Hwan
Wojcik, John B
Kang, John
contents Digital pathology plays a vital role across modern medicine, offering critical insights for disease diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. However, histopathology images often contain artifacts introduced during slide preparation and digitization. Detecting and excluding them is essential to ensure reliable downstream analysis. Traditional supervised models typically require large annotated datasets, which is resource-intensive and not generalizable to novel artifact types. To address this, we propose DiffusionQC, which detects artifacts as outliers among clean images using a diffusion model. It requires only a set of clean images for training rather than pixel-level artifact annotations and predefined artifact types. Furthermore, we introduce a contrastive learning module to explicitly enlarge the distribution separation between artifact and clean images, yielding an enhanced version of our method. Empirical results demonstrate superior performance to state-of-the-art and offer cross-stain generalization capacity, with significantly less data and annotations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_12233
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DiffusionQC: Artifact Detection in Histopathology via Diffusion Model
Wang, Zhenzhen
Zhou, Zhongliang
Wen, Zhuoyu
Kook, Jeong Hwan
Wojcik, John B
Kang, John
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Digital pathology plays a vital role across modern medicine, offering critical insights for disease diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. However, histopathology images often contain artifacts introduced during slide preparation and digitization. Detecting and excluding them is essential to ensure reliable downstream analysis. Traditional supervised models typically require large annotated datasets, which is resource-intensive and not generalizable to novel artifact types. To address this, we propose DiffusionQC, which detects artifacts as outliers among clean images using a diffusion model. It requires only a set of clean images for training rather than pixel-level artifact annotations and predefined artifact types. Furthermore, we introduce a contrastive learning module to explicitly enlarge the distribution separation between artifact and clean images, yielding an enhanced version of our method. Empirical results demonstrate superior performance to state-of-the-art and offer cross-stain generalization capacity, with significantly less data and annotations.
title DiffusionQC: Artifact Detection in Histopathology via Diffusion Model
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.12233