Mine local homogeneous representation by interaction information clustering with unsupervised learning in histopathology images

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE

The success of data-driven deep learning for histopathology images often depends on high-quality training sets and fine-grained annotations. However, as tumors are heterogeneous and annotations are expensive, unsupervised learning approaches are desirable to obtain full automation.

METHODS

In this paper, an Interaction Information Clustering (IIC) method is proposed to extract locally homogeneous features in mutually exclusive clusters. Trained in an unsupervised paradigm, the framework learns invariant information from multiple spatially adjacent regions for improved classification. Additionally, an adaptive Conditional Random Field (CRF) model is incorporated to detect spatially adjacent image patches of high morphological homogeneity in an offset-constraint free manner.

RESULTS

Empirically, the proposed model achieves an observable improvement of 11.4% on the downstream patch-level classification accuracy, compared with state-of-the-art unsupervised learning approaches.

CONCLUSION

Furthermore, evaluated with our clinically collected histopathology whole-slide images, the proposed model shows high consistency in tissue distribution compared with well-trained supervised learning, which is of important diagnostic significance in clinical practice.

Functional connectivity inference from fMRI data using multivariate information measures

Shannon's entropy or an extension of Shannon's entropy can be used to quantify information transmission between or among variables. Mutual information is the pair-wise information that captures nonlinear relationships between variables. It is more robust than linear correlation methods. Beyond mutual information, two generalizations are defined for multivariate distributions: interaction information or co-information and total correlation or multi-mutual information. In comparison to mutual information, interaction information and total correlation are underutilized and poorly studied in applied neuroscience research. Quantifying information flow between brain regions is not explicitly explained in neuroscience by interaction information and total correlation. This article aims to clarify the distinctions between the neuroscience concepts of mutual information, interaction information, and total correlation. Additionally, we proposed a novel method for determining the interaction information between three variables using total correlation and conditional mutual information. On the other hand, how to apply it properly in practical situations. We supplied both simulation experiments and real neural studies to estimate functional connectivity in the brain with the above three higher-order information-theoretic approaches. In order to capture redundancy information for multivariate variables, we discovered that interaction information and total correlation were both robust, and it could be able to capture both well-known and yet-to-be-discovered functional brain connections.