HistoSSL: Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Classifying Histopathology Images

The success of image classification depends on copious annotated images for training. Annotating histopathology images is costly and laborious. Although several successful self-supervised representation learning approaches have been introduced, they are still insufficient to consider the unique characteristics of histopathology images. In this work, we propose the novel histopathology-oriented self-supervised representation learning framework (HistoSSL) to efficiently extract representations from unlabeled histopathology images at three levels: global, cell, and stain. The model transfers remarkably to downstream tasks: colorectal tissue phenotyping on the NCTCRC dataset and breast cancer metastasis recognition on the CAMELYON16 dataset. HistoSSL achieved higher accuracies than state-of-the-art self-supervised learning approaches, which proved the robustness of the learned representations.