Region-Affinity Attention for Whole-Slide Breast Cancer Classification in Deep Ultraviolet Imaging

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Shaik, Nagur Shareef, Cherukuri, Teja Krishna, Ye, Dong Hye
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Shaik, Nagur Shareef
Cherukuri, Teja Krishna
Ye, Dong Hye
author_facet Shaik, Nagur Shareef
Cherukuri, Teja Krishna
Ye, Dong Hye
contents Breast cancer diagnosis demands rapid and precise tools, yet traditional histopathological methods often fall short in intra-operative settings. Deep Ultraviolet (DUV) fluorescence imaging emerges as a transformative approach, offering high-contrast, label-free visualization of whole-slide images (WSIs) with unprecedented detail, surpassing conventional hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining in speed and resolution. However, existing deep learning methods for breast cancer classification, predominantly patch-based, fragment spatial context and incur significant preprocessing overhead, limiting their clinical utility. Moreover, standard attention mechanisms, such as Spatial, Squeeze-and-Excitation, Global Context and Guided Context Gating, fail to fully exploit the rich, multi-scale regional relationships inherent in DUV-WSI data, often prioritizing generic feature recalibration over diagnostic specificity. This study introduces a novel Region-Affinity Attention mechanism tailored for DUV-WSI breast cancer classification, processing entire slides without patching to preserve spatial integrity. By modeling local neighbor distances and constructing a full affinity matrix, our method dynamically highlights diagnostically relevant regions, augmented by a contrastive loss to enhance feature discriminability. Evaluated on a dataset of 136 DUV-WSI samples, our approach achieves an accuracy of 92.67 +/- 0.73% and an AUC of 95.97%, outperforming existing attention methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_17222
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Region-Affinity Attention for Whole-Slide Breast Cancer Classification in Deep Ultraviolet Imaging
Shaik, Nagur Shareef
Cherukuri, Teja Krishna
Ye, Dong Hye
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Signal Processing
Breast cancer diagnosis demands rapid and precise tools, yet traditional histopathological methods often fall short in intra-operative settings. Deep Ultraviolet (DUV) fluorescence imaging emerges as a transformative approach, offering high-contrast, label-free visualization of whole-slide images (WSIs) with unprecedented detail, surpassing conventional hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining in speed and resolution. However, existing deep learning methods for breast cancer classification, predominantly patch-based, fragment spatial context and incur significant preprocessing overhead, limiting their clinical utility. Moreover, standard attention mechanisms, such as Spatial, Squeeze-and-Excitation, Global Context and Guided Context Gating, fail to fully exploit the rich, multi-scale regional relationships inherent in DUV-WSI data, often prioritizing generic feature recalibration over diagnostic specificity. This study introduces a novel Region-Affinity Attention mechanism tailored for DUV-WSI breast cancer classification, processing entire slides without patching to preserve spatial integrity. By modeling local neighbor distances and constructing a full affinity matrix, our method dynamically highlights diagnostically relevant regions, augmented by a contrastive loss to enhance feature discriminability. Evaluated on a dataset of 136 DUV-WSI samples, our approach achieves an accuracy of 92.67 +/- 0.73% and an AUC of 95.97%, outperforming existing attention methods.
title Region-Affinity Attention for Whole-Slide Breast Cancer Classification in Deep Ultraviolet Imaging
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.17222