A Hierarchical Transformer Encoder to Improve Entire Neoplasm Segmentation on Whole Slide Image of Hepatocellular Carcinoma

In digital histopathology, entire neoplasm segmentation on Whole Slide Image (WSI) of Hepatocellular Carcinoma (HCC) plays an important role, especially as a preprocessing filter to automatically exclude healthy tissue, in histological molecular correlations mining and other downstream histopathological tasks. The segmentation task remains challenging due to HCC's inherent high-heterogeneity and the lack of dependency learning in large field of view. In this article, we propose a novel deep learning architecture with a hierarchical Transformer encoder, HiTrans, to learn the global dependencies within expanded 4096×4096 WSI patches. HiTrans is designed to encode and decode the patches with larger reception fields and the learned global dependencies, compared to the state-of-the-art Fully Convolutional Neural networks (FCNN). Empirical evaluations verified that HiTrans leads to better segmentation performance by taking into account regional and global dependency information.