A State-of-the-art Survey of Artificial Neural Networks for Whole-slide Image Analysis:from Popular Convolutional Neural Networks to Potential Visual Transformers
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Abstract (arXiv)
To increase the objectivity and accuracy of pathologists' work, artificial neural network(ANN) methods have been generally needed in the segmentation, classification, and detection of histopathological WSI. In this paper, WSI analysis methods based on ANN are reviewed. Firstly, the development status of WSI and ANN methods is introduced. Secondly, we summarize the common ANN methods. Next, we discuss publicly available WSI datasets and evaluation metrics. These ANN architectures for WSI processing are divided into classical neural networks and deep neural networks(DNNs) and then analyzed. Finally, the application prospect of the analytical method in this field is discussed. The important potential method is Visual Transformers.
Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 52 of its 171 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Apr 2021.
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Citing papers per year: 2022: 1; 2023: 1; 2024: 2; 2025: 2; 2026: 1.
7 papers.
- 2023A Comprehensive Evaluation of Large Language Models on Benchmark Biomedical Text Processing Taskscited by 36
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- 2024The object detection model uses combined extraction with KNN and RF classificationcited by 0
- 2025AI Assisted Cervical Cancer Screening for Cytology Samples in Developing Countriescited by 0
- 2025PathReasoning: A multimodal reasoning agent for query-based ROI navigation on whole-slide imagescited by 0
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- 2025PathReasoning: A multimodal reasoning agent for query-based ROI navigation on whole-slide images26 Nov 2025
- 2025AI Assisted Cervical Cancer Screening for Cytology Samples in Developing Countries29 Apr 2025
- 2024M4: Multi-Proxy Multi-Gate Mixture of Experts Network for Multiple Instance Learning in Histopathology Image Analysis24 Jul 2024
- 2024The object detection model uses combined extraction with KNN and RF classification9 May 2024
- 2023A Comprehensive Evaluation of Large Language Models on Benchmark Biomedical Text Processing Tasks6 Oct 2023
- 2022A State-of-the-art Survey of U-Net in Microscopic Image Analysis: from Simple Usage to Structure Mortification14 Feb 2022