Weakly supervised histopathology image segmentation with self-attention

Accurate segmentation in histopathology images at pixel-level plays a critical role in the digital pathology workflow. The development of weakly supervised methods for histopathology image segmentation liberates pathologists from time-consuming and labor-intensive works, opening up possibilities of further automated quantitative analysis of whole-slide histopathology images. As an effective subgroup of weakly supervised methods, multiple instance learning (MIL) has achieved great success in histopathology images. In this paper, we specially treat pixels as instances so that the histopathology image segmentation task is transformed into an instance prediction task in MIL. However, the lack of relations between instances in MIL limits the further improvement of segmentation performance. Therefore, we propose a novel weakly supervised method called SA-MIL for pixel-level segmentation in histopathology images. SA-MIL introduces a self-attention mechanism into the MIL framework, which captures global correlation among all instances. In addition, we use deep supervision to make the best use of information from limited annotations in the weakly supervised method. Our approach makes up for the shortcoming that instances are independent of each other in MIL by aggregating global contextual information. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results compared to other weakly supervised methods on two histopathology image datasets. It is evident that our approach has generalization ability for the high performance on both tissue and cell histopathology datasets. There is potential in our approach for various applications in medical images. [Display omitted] •Introducing the self-attention mechanism into the standard MIL framework.•The self-attention module captures correlation between independent instances in MIL.•Deep supervision provides more supervised information for the network.•Evaluation on two cancer datasets and performance close to fully-supervised methods.