A Petri Dish for Histopathology Image Analysis
Title:
A Petri Dish for Histopathology Image Analysis
Link:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-77211-6_2
Abstract:
With the rise of deep learning, there has been increased interest in using neural networks for histopathology image analysis, a field that investigates the properties of biopsy or resected specimens traditionally manually examined under a microscope by pathologists. However, challenges such as limited data, costly annotation, and processing high-resolution and variable-size images make it difficult to quickly iterate over model designs.
Throughout scientific history, many significant research directions have leveraged small-scale experimental setups as petri dishes to efficiently evaluate exploratory ideas. In this paper, we introduce a minimalist histopathology image analysis dataset (MHIST), an analogous petri dish for histopathology image analysis. MHIST is a binary classification dataset of 3,152 fixed-size images of colorectal polyps, each with a gold-standard label determined by the majority vote of seven board-certified gastrointestinal pathologists and annotator agreement level. MHIST occupies less than 400 MB of disk space, and a ResNet-18 baseline can be trained to convergence on MHIST in just 6 min using 3.5 GB of memory on a NVIDIA RTX 3090. As example use cases, we use MHIST to study natural questions such as how dataset size, network depth, transfer learning, and high-disagreement examples affect model performance.
By introducing MHIST, we hope to not only help facilitate the work of current histopathology imaging researchers, but also make the field more-accessible to the general community. Our dataset is available at https://bmirds.github.io/MHIST.
Citation:
Jerry Wei, Arief Suriawinata, Bing Ren, Xiaoying Liu, Mikhail Lisovsky, Louis Vaickus, Charles Brown, Michael Baker, Naofumi Tomita, Lorenzo Torresani, Jason Wei, Saeed Hassanpour, “A Petri Dish for Histopathology Image Analysis”, International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME), 12721:11-24, 2021.