TopoCellGen: Generating Histopathology Cell Topology with a Diffusion Model

TL;DR

This paper introduces TopoCellGen, a diffusion model that incorporates topological constraints to generate realistic multi-class cell layouts in histopathology, improving tissue simulation and analysis.

Contribution

It presents a novel diffusion-based method with topological constraints and a new Topological Frechet Distance metric for evaluating cell topology fidelity.

Findings

Generated layouts accurately reflect complex topological relationships.

The method outperforms traditional metrics in assessing topology.

Enhanced simulation supports better downstream pathology tasks.

Abstract

Accurately modeling multi-class cell topology is crucial in digital pathology, as it provides critical insights into tissue structure and pathology. The synthetic generation of cell topology enables realistic simulations of complex tissue environments, enhances downstream tasks by augmenting training data, aligns more closely with pathologists' domain knowledge, and offers new opportunities for controlling and generalizing the tumor microenvironment. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that integrates topological constraints into a diffusion model to improve the generation of realistic, contextually accurate cell topologies. Our method refines the simulation of cell distributions and interactions, increasing the precision and interpretability of results in downstream tasks such as cell detection and classification. To assess the topological fidelity of generated layouts, we introduce a new metric, Topological Frechet Distance (TopoFD), which overcomes the limitations of traditional metrics like FID in evaluating topological structure. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in generating multi-class cell layouts that capture intricate topological relationships. Code is available at https://github.com/Melon-Xu/TopoCellGen.