Toward Robust Histology-Prior Embedding for Endomicroscopy Image Classification

Representation learning is the critical task for medical image analysis in computer-aided diagnosis. However, it is challenging to learn discriminative features due to the limited size of the dataset and the lack of labels. In this paper, we propose a stochastic routing normalization and neighborhood embedding framework with application to breast tissue classification by learning discriminative features of probe-based confocal laser endomicroscopy. In order to align the low-level and mid-level of pCLE and histology domain, we firstly build the domain-specific normalization module with stochastic activation strategy considering both depth-wise and feature-wise criterion. For high-level features, the latent centers are learned from the histology domain as the template for feature matching. The proposed method is evaluated on a clinical database with 700 pCLE mosaics. The accuracy of image classification with limited training samples demonstrates that the proposed method can outperform previous works on domain alignment.