Local augmentation based consistency learning for semi-supervised pathology image classification.
Journal:
Computer methods and programs in biomedicine
Published Date:
Feb 24, 2023
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Labeling pathology images is often costly and time-consuming, which is quite detrimental for supervised pathology image classification that relies heavily on sufficient labeled data during training. Exploring semi-supervised methods based on image augmentation and consistency regularization may effectively alleviate this problem. Nevertheless, traditional image-based augmentation (e.g., flip) produces only a single enhancement to an image, whereas combining multiple image sources may mix unimportant image regions resulting in poor performance. In addition, the regularization losses used in these augmentation approaches typically enforce the consistency of image level predictions, and meanwhile simply require each prediction of augmented image to be consistent bilaterally, which may force pathology image features with better predictions to be wrongly aligned towards the features with worse predictions.