Histomorphology-driven multi-instance learning for breast cancer WSI classification

Histomorphology is crucial in breast cancer diagnosis. However, existing whole slide image (WSI) classification methods struggle to effectively incorporate histomorphology information, limiting their ability to capture key and fine-grained pathological features. To address this limitation, we propose a novel framework that explicitly incorporates histomorphology (tumor cellularity, cellular morphology, and tissue architecture) into WSI classification. Specifically, our approach consists of three key components: (1) estimating the importance of tumor-related histomorphology information at the patch level based on medical prior knowledge; (2) generating representative cluster-level features through histomorphology-driven cluster pooling; and (3) enabling WSI-level classification through histomorphology-driven multi-instance aggregation. With the incorporation of histomorphological information, our framework strengthens the model's ability to capture key and fine-grained pathological patterns, thereby enhancing WSI classification performance. Experimental results demonstrate its effectiveness, achieving high diagnostic accuracy for molecular subtyping and cancer subtyping. The code will be made available atthis https URL.

@article{wang2025_2503.17983,
  title={ Histomorphology-driven multi-instance learning for breast cancer WSI classification },
  author={ Baizhi Wang and Rui Yan and Wenxin Ma and Xu Zhang and Yuhao Wang and Xiaolong Li and Yunjie Gu and Zihang Jiang and S. Kevin Zhou },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.17983},
  year={ 2025 }
}