Bridging the Pathology Domain Gap: Efficiently Adapting CLIP for Pathology Image Analysis with Limited Labeled Data

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has shown its proficiency in acquiring distinctive visual representations and exhibiting strong generalization across diverse vision tasks. However, its effectiveness in pathology image analysis, particularly with limited labeled data, remains an ongoing area of investigation due to challenges associated with significant domain shifts and catastrophic forgetting. Thus, it is imperative to devise efficient adaptation strategies in this domain to enable scalable analysis. In this study, we introduce Path-CLIP, a framework tailored for a swift adaptation of CLIP to various pathology tasks. Firstly, we propose Residual Feature Refinement (RFR) with a dynamically adjustable ratio to effectively integrate and balance source and task-specific knowledge. Secondly, we introduce Hidden Representation Perturbation (HRP) and Dual-view Vision Contrastive (DVC) techniques to mitigate overfitting issues. Finally, we present the Doublet Multimodal Contrastive Loss (DMCL) for fine-tuning CLIP for pathology tasks. We demonstrate that Path-CLIP adeptly adapts pre-trained CLIP to downstream pathology tasks, yielding competitive results. Specifically, Path-CLIP achieves over +19% improvement in accuracy when utilizing mere 0.1% of labeled data in PCam with only 10 minutes of fine-tuning while running on a single GPU.