M4: Multi-proxy multi-gate mixture of experts network for multiple instance learning in histopathology image analysis.
Journal:
Medical image analysis
Published Date:
Apr 1, 2025
Abstract
Multiple instance learning (MIL) has been successfully applied for whole slide images (WSIs) analysis in computational pathology, enabling a wide range of prediction tasks from tumor subtyping to inferring genetic mutations and multi-omics biomarkers. However, existing MIL methods predominantly focus on single-task learning, resulting in not only overall low efficiency but also the overlook of inter-task relatedness. To address these issues, we proposed an adapted architecture of Multi-gate Mixture-of-experts with Multi-proxy for Multiple instance learning (M4), and applied this framework for simultaneous prediction of multiple genetic mutations from WSIs. The proposed M4 model has two main innovations: (1) adopting a multi-gate mixture-of-experts strategy for multiple genetic mutation simultaneous prediction on a single WSI; (2) introducing a multi-proxy CNN construction on the expert and gate networks to effectively and efficiently capture patch-patch interactions from WSI. Our model achieved significant improvements across five tested TCGA datasets in comparison to current state-of-the-art single-task methods. The code is available at: https://github.com/Bigyehahaha/M4.
