Foundation Model-Based Zero-Shot Tissue Segmentation of Pathological Images via the Mixture of Local-to-Global...

Tissue segmentation in pathological images plays a crucial role for the diagnosis and prognosis of human cancers. However, due to the complexity of tumor micro-environment, it is difficult to annotate all tissue types especially for the categories with small tissue proportions, which limits the ability of the traditional tissue segmentation models to these tissue types with zero training samples. To address the above issues, we present a novel architecture, ZSPMLG, that relies on pathology vision-language foundation model (i.e., CONCH) to learn pixel-wise classifiers for both seen and unseen tissue types based on their text descriptions. Specifically, we firstly apply large language model (LLM) to generate the descriptions for both seen and unseen tissue categories, followed by feeding them to the CONCH text encoder to acquire their corresponding prototypes that are shared by both vision and semantic space. By considering that the textual descriptions of specific tissue categories can be observed from the pathological images at different scales of magnification, our ZSPMLG consists of Mixture of Local Experts (MoLE) and Mixture of Global Experts (MoGE) modules, where MoLE performs the specialized decoding that can map individual scale patch-level representation to dense pixel-level representation, while MoGE aims at fusing the multi-scale representations together. Finally, a convolutional layer is designed to map the pixel-level representation to the category prototype for tissue segmentation on both seen and unseen categories. We evaluate our method on three datasets and the experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method on both seen and unseen tissue categories.