Stegmüller T, Abbet C, Bozorgtabar B, Clarke H, Petignat P, Vassilakos P, Thiran JP. Self-supervised learning-based cervical cytology for the triage of HPV-positive women in resource-limited settings and low-data regime.
Comput Biol Med 2024;
169:107809. [PMID:
38113684 DOI:
10.1016/j.compbiomed.2023.107809]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/19/2023] [Revised: 11/24/2023] [Accepted: 12/01/2023] [Indexed: 12/21/2023]
Abstract
Screening Papanicolaou test samples has proven to be highly effective in reducing cervical cancer-related mortality. However, the lack of trained cytopathologists hinders its widespread implementation in low-resource settings. Deep learning-assisted telecytology diagnosis emerges as an appealing alternative, but it requires the collection of large annotated training datasets, which is costly and time-consuming. In this paper, we demonstrate that the abundance of unlabeled images that can be extracted from Pap smear test whole slide images presents a fertile ground for self-supervised learning methods, yielding performance improvements compared to off-the-shelf pre-trained models for various downstream tasks. In particular, we propose Cervical Cell Copy-Pasting (C3P) as an effective augmentation method, which enables knowledge transfer from public and labeled single-cell datasets to unlabeled tiles. Not only does C3P outperforms naive transfer from single-cell images, but we also demonstrate its advantageous integration into multiple instance learning methods. Importantly, all our experiments are conducted on our introduced in-house dataset comprising liquid-based cytology Pap smear images obtained using low-cost technologies. This aligns with our long-term objective of deep learning-assisted telecytology for diagnosis in low-resource settings.
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