Few-Shot Histopathology Image Classification: Evaluating State-of-the-Art Methods and Unveiling Performance Insights

TL;DR

This study evaluates state-of-the-art few-shot learning methods on histopathology images, revealing comparable performance with traditional methods and highlighting domain-specific challenges in medical image classification.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive evaluation of few-shot learning techniques on multiple histopathology datasets, offering insights into their effectiveness and domain-specific challenges.

Findings

Best methods achieved over 70%, 80%, and 85% accuracy in 5-way 1-shot, 5-way 5-shot, and 5-way 10-shot scenarios.

Meta-learning approaches perform similarly to fine-tuning and regularization methods on histology data.

Challenges include domain variability and the need for unbiased evaluation in specialized medical imaging tasks.

Abstract

This paper presents a study on few-shot classification in the context of histopathology images. While few-shot learning has been studied for natural image classification, its application to histopathology is relatively unexplored. Given the scarcity of labeled data in medical imaging and the inherent challenges posed by diverse tissue types and data preparation techniques, this research evaluates the performance of state-of-the-art few-shot learning methods for various scenarios on histology data. We have considered four histopathology datasets for few-shot histopathology image classification and have evaluated 5-way 1-shot, 5-way 5-shot and 5-way 10-shot scenarios with a set of state-of-the-art classification techniques. The best methods have surpassed an accuracy of 70%, 80% and 85% in the cases of 5-way 1-shot, 5-way 5-shot and 5-way 10-shot cases, respectively. We found that for histology images popular meta-learning approaches is at par with standard fine-tuning and regularization methods. Our experiments underscore the challenges of working with images from different domains and underscore the significance of unbiased and focused evaluations in advancing computer vision techniques for specialized domains, such as histology images.