Recurrence prediction of gastric cancer based on multi-resolution feature fusion and context information

Abstract

Pathological images of gastric cancer serve as the gold standard for diagnosing this malignancy. However, the recurrence prediction task often encounters challenges such as insignificant morphological features of the lesions, insufficient fusion of multi-resolution features, and inability to leverage contextual information effectively. To address these issues, a three-stage recurrence prediction method based on pathological images of gastric cancer is proposed. In the first stage, the self-supervised learning framework SimCLR was adopted to train low-resolution patch images, aiming to diminish the interdependence among diverse tissue images and yield decoupled enhanced features. In the second stage, the obtained low-resolution enhanced features were fused with the corresponding high-resolution unenhanced features to achieve feature complementation across multiple resolutions. In the third stage, to address the position encoding difficulty caused by the large difference in the number of patch images, we performed position encoding based on multi-scale local neighborhoods and employed self-attention mechanism to obtain features with contextual information. The resulting contextual features were further combined with the local features extracted by the convolutional neural network. The evaluation results on clinically collected data showed that, compared with the best performance of traditional methods, the proposed network provided the best accuracy and area under curve (AUC), which were improved by 7.63% and 4.51%, respectively. These results have effectively validated the usefulness of this method in predicting gastric cancer recurrence.