Sequential Attention-based Sampling for Histopathological Analysis

Deep neural networks are increasingly applied in automated histopathology. Yet, whole-slide images (WSIs) are often acquired at gigapixel sizes, rendering them computationally infeasible to analyze entirely at high resolution. Diagnostic labels are largely available only at the slide-level, because expert annotation of images at a finer (patch) level is both laborious and expensive. Moreover, regions with diagnostic information typically occupy only a small fraction of the WSI, making it inefficient to examine the entire slide at full resolution. Here, we propose SASHA - Sequential Attention-based Sampling for Histopathological Analysis - a deep reinforcement learning approach for efficient analysis of histopathological images.