Knowledge-enhanced Visual-Language Pretraining for Computational Pathology

In this paper, we consider the problem of visual representation learning for computational pathology, by exploiting large-scale image-text pairs gathered from public resources, along with the domain-specific knowledge in pathology. Specifically, we make the following contributions: (i) We curate a pathology knowledge tree that consists of 50,470 informative attributes for 4,718 diseases requiring pathology diagnosis from 32 human tissues. To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive structured pathology knowledge base; (ii) We develop a knowledge-enhanced visual-language pretraining approach, where we first project pathology-specific knowledge into latent embedding space via language model, and use it to guide the learning of visual representation; (iii) We conduct thorough experiments to validate the effectiveness of our proposed components, demonstrating significant performance improvement on various downstream tasks, including cross-modal retrieval, zero-shot classification on pathology patches, and zero-shot tumor subtyping on whole slide images (WSIs). All codes, models and the pathology knowledge tree will be released to the research community.