Magnification Prior: A Self-Supervised Method for Learning Representations on Breast Cancer Histopathological Images

TL;DR

This paper introduces a self-supervised learning method called Magnification Prior Contrastive Similarity (MPCS) that leverages magnification factors to learn effective representations of breast cancer histopathology images without labels, achieving state-of-the-art results with limited labeled data.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel self-supervised approach that exploits magnification information to improve representation learning in histopathology, reducing reliance on human annotations.

Findings

MPCS matches fully supervised performance with only 20% labeled data.

Outperforms previous supervised methods in fully labeled settings.

Reduces human prior in representation learning for medical images.

Abstract

This work presents a novel self-supervised pre-training method to learn efficient representations without labels on histopathology medical images utilizing magnification factors. Other state-of-theart works mainly focus on fully supervised learning approaches that rely heavily on human annotations. However, the scarcity of labeled and unlabeled data is a long-standing challenge in histopathology. Currently, representation learning without labels remains unexplored for the histopathology domain. The proposed method, Magnification Prior Contrastive Similarity (MPCS), enables self-supervised learning of representations without labels on small-scale breast cancer dataset BreakHis by exploiting magnification factor, inductive transfer, and reducing human prior. The proposed method matches fully supervised learning state-of-the-art performance in malignancy classification when only 20% of labels are used in fine-tuning and outperform previous works in fully supervised learning settings. It formulates a hypothesis and provides empirical evidence to support that reducing human-prior leads to efficient representation learning in self-supervision. The implementation of this work is available online on GitHub - https://github.com/prakashchhipa/Magnification-Prior-Self-Supervised-Method