# A State-of-the-art Survey of Artificial Neural Networks for Whole-slide Image Analysis:from Popular Convolutional Neural Networks to Potential Visual Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.06243 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06243/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 171 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Inception-v4, Inception-ResNet and the Impact of Residual Connections on Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07261/) (2016)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03044/) (2015)
- [Transformers in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01169/) (2021)
- [An Introduction to Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.08458/) (2015)
- [Recent Advances in Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.07108/) (2015)
- [MaX-DeepLab: End-to-End Panoptic Segmentation with Mask Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00759/) (2020)
- [Patch-based Convolutional Neural Network for Whole Slide Tissue Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.07947/) (2015)
- [Deep Learning for Identifying Metastatic Breast Cancer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05718/) (2016)
- [Machine learning methods for histopathological image analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00786/) (2017)
- [Predicting breast tumor proliferation from whole-slide images: the TUPAC16 challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08284/) (2018)
- [Whole-Slide Mitosis Detection in H&E Breast Histology Using PHH3 as a Reference to Train Distilled Stain-Invariant Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05896/) (2018)
- [A Comprehensive Review of Computer-aided Whole-slide Image Analysis: from Datasets to Feature Extraction, Segmentation, Classification, and Detection Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10553/) (2021)
- [Classification and Disease Localization in Histopathology Using Only Global Labels: A Weakly-Supervised Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02212/) (2018)
- [RMDL: Recalibrated multi-instance deep learning for whole slide gastric image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06440/) (2020)
- [Deep-Learning for Classification of Colorectal Polyps on Whole-Slide Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01550/) (2017)
- [A Comprehensive Review for Breast Histopathology Image Analysis Using Classical and Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12255/) (2020)
- [DeepCervix: A Deep Learning-based Framework for the Classification of Cervical Cells Using Hybrid Deep Feature Fusion Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12191/) (2021)
- [Adversarial Domain Adaptation for Classification of Prostate Histopathology Whole-Slide Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01357/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [A Comprehensive Evaluation of Large Language Models on Benchmark Biomedical Text Processing Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04270/) (2023)
- [M4: Multi-Proxy Multi-Gate Mixture of Experts Network for Multiple Instance Learning in Histopathology Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17267/) (2024)
- [A State-of-the-art Survey of U-Net in Microscopic Image Analysis: from Simple Usage to Structure Mortification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06465/) (2022)
- [The object detection model uses combined extraction with KNN and RF classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05551/) (2024)
- [AI Assisted Cervical Cancer Screening for Cytology Samples in Developing Countries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20435/) (2025)
- [PathReasoning: A multimodal reasoning agent for query-based ROI navigation on whole-slide images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21902/) (2025)
- [CytoCLIP: Learning Cytoarchitectural Characteristics in Developing Human Brain Using Contrastive Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12282/) (2026)

## 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.