Track papers across labs, topics, and trends.
Search papers, labs, and topics across Lattice.
This study introduces a weakly supervised framework for PET-based medical image retrieval that leverages H&E derived information during training while ensuring inference is based solely on PET data. By employing a teacher-student training strategy, the researchers generated voxel representations and embeddings that capture intra-tumor heterogeneity, significantly enhancing retrieval performance. The findings reveal that incorporating pathology-informed supervision and focusing on tumor hotspots leads to superior sensitivity in distinguishing tumor subregions compared to traditional global PET representations.
Incorporating pathology-informed supervision into PET image retrieval boosts performance by effectively capturing intra-tumor heterogeneity.
We propose a weakly supervised 18FFDG PET representation-learning framework for content based medical image retrieval, using H&E derived information during training while preserving PET-only inference. The proposed method was designed to use H&E derived information during training while maintaining PET only inference. A teacher student training strategy was used to learn the PET tumour derived voxel representations, from which global and hotspot conditioned embeddings were generated along with maps of intra tumour heterogeneity in our oesophegeal cancer test case. A progressive ablation strategy was used to evaluate the contribution of different supervision mechanisms. Retrieval performance was assessed across cross-validation folds using metrics including mean average precision, normalised discounted cumulative gain and mean reciprocal rank. Additional analyses evaluated ablation performance, hotspot faithfulness through perturbation/deletion experiments, prototype-specific PET uptake behaviour and indirect patient level concordance between learned PET prototype classes and selected histomic features. Progressive introduction of pathology informed supervision and hotspot modelling improved PET retrieval performance compared with global PET representations and conventional PET baselines. Across the ablation ladder, PET hotspot conditioned representations consistently provided stronger retrieval than global embeddings, indicating that focusing on informative tumour subregions improved sensitivity to intra tumour heterogeneity. Histopathology concordance further showed that the learned classes were not simply high uptake PET regions; instead, they demonstrated distinct heterogeneity in 18F FDG uptake.