Rotation-Agnostic Image Representation Learning for Digital Pathology
Authors: Saghir Alfasly, Abubakr Shafique, Peyman Nejat, Jibran Khan, Areej Alsaafin, Ghazal Alabtah, H.R. Tizhoosh

This paper addresses complex challenges in histopathological image analysis through three key contributions. Firstly it introduces a fast patch selection method FPS for whole-slide image (WSI) analysis significantly reducing computational cost while maintaining accuracy. Secondly it presents PathDino a lightweight histopathology feature extractor with a minimal configuration of five Transformer blocks and only ? 9 million parameters markedly fewer than alternatives. Thirdly it introduces a rotation-agnostic representation learning paradigm using self-supervised learning effectively mitigating overfitting. We also show that our compact model outperforms existing state-of-the-art histopathology-specific vision transformers on 12 diverse datasets including both internal datasets spanning four sites (breast liver skin and colorectal) and seven public datasets (PANDA CAMELYON16 BRACS DigestPath Kather PanNuke and WSSS4LUAD). Notably even with a training dataset of ? 6 million histopathology patches from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) our approach demonstrates an average 8.5% improvement in patch-level majority vote performance. These contributions provide a robust framework for enhancing image analysis in digital pathology rigorously validated through extensive evaluation.