Shuffle Instances-based Vision Transformer for Pancreatic Cancer ROSE Image Classification

The rapid on-site evaluation (ROSE) technique can signifi-cantly accelerate the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer by im-mediately analyzing the fast-stained cytopathological images. Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) can potentially address the shortage of pathologists in ROSE. However, the cancerous patterns vary significantly between different samples, making the CAD task extremely challenging. Besides, the ROSE images have complicated perturbations regarding color distribution, brightness, and contrast due to different staining qualities and various acquisition device types. To address these challenges, we proposed a shuffle instances-based Vision Transformer (SI-ViT) approach, which can reduce the perturbations and enhance the modeling among the instances. With the regrouped bags of shuffle instances and their bag-level soft labels, the approach utilizes a regression head to make the model focus on the cells rather than various perturbations. Simultaneously, combined with a classification head, the model can effectively identify the general distributive patterns among different instances. The results demonstrate significant improvements in the classification accuracy with more accurate attention regions, indicating that the diverse patterns of ROSE images are effectively extracted, and the complicated perturbations are significantly reduced. It also suggests that the SI-ViT has excellent potential in analyzing cytopathological images. The code and experimental results are available at https://github.com/sagizty/MIL-SI.