Generalized Multiple Instance Learning for Cancer Detection in Digital Histopathology

Abstract

We address the task of detecting cancer in histological slide images based on training with weak, slide- and patch-level annotations, which are considerably easier to obtain than pixel-level annotations. we use CNN based patch-level descriptors and formulate the image classification task as a generalized multiple instance learning (MIL) problem. The generalization consists of requiring a certain number of positive instances in positive bags, instead of just one as in standard MIL. The descriptors are learned on a small number of patch-level annotations, while the MIL layer uses only image-level patches for training.