Histo-Fetch - On-the-Fly Processing of Gigapixel Whole Slide Images Simplifies and Speeds Neural Network Training

Training convolutional neural networks using pathology whole slide images (WSIs) is traditionally prefaced by the extraction of a training dataset of image patches. While effective, for large datasets of WSIs, this dataset preparation is inefficient.

We created a custom pipeline (histo-fetch) to efficiently extract random patches and labels from pathology WSIs for input to a neural network on-the-fly. We prefetch these patches as needed during network training, avoiding the need for WSI preparation such as chopping/tiling.

We demonstrate the utility of this pipeline to perform artificial stain transfer and image generation using the popular networks CycleGAN and ProGAN, respectively. For a large WSI dataset, histo-fetch is 98.6% faster to start training and used 7535x less disk space.