In the present study, we propose a novel case-based similar image retrieval (SIR) method for hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-stained histopathological images of malignant lymphoma. When a whole slide image (WSI) is used as an input query, it is desirable to be able to retrieve similar cases by focusing on image patches in pathologically important regions such as tumor cells. To address this problem, we employ attention-based multiple instance learning, which enables us to focus on tumor-specific regions when the similarity between cases is computed. Moreover, we employ contrastive distance metric learning to incorporate immunohistochemical (IHC) staining patterns as useful supervised information for defining appropriate similarity between heterogeneous malignant lymphoma cases. In the experiment with 249 malignant lymphoma patients, we confirmed that the proposed method exhibited higher evaluation measures than the baseline case-based SIR methods. Furthermore, the subjective evaluation by pathologists revealed that our similarity measure using IHC staining patterns is appropriate for representing the similarity of H&E-stained tissue images for malignant lymphoma.
@article{arxiv.2107.03602,
title = {Case-based Similar Image Retrieval for Weakly Annotated Large Histopathological Images of Malignant Lymphoma Using Deep Metric Learning},
author = {Noriaki Hashimoto and Yusuke Takagi and Hiroki Masuda and Hiroaki Miyoshi and Kei Kohno and Miharu Nagaishi and Kensaku Sato and Mai Takeuchi and Takuya Furuta and Keisuke Kawamoto and Kyohei Yamada and Mayuko Moritsubo and Kanako Inoue and Yasumasa Shimasaki and Yusuke Ogura and Teppei Imamoto and Tatsuzo Mishina and Ken Tanaka and Yoshino Kawaguchi and Shigeo Nakamura and Koichi Ohshima and Hidekata Hontani and Ichiro Takeuchi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.03602},
year = {2023}
}