Papers › Kernel Attention Transformer (KAT) for Histopathology Whole Slide Image Classification

Kernel Attention Transformer (KAT) for Histopathology Whole Slide Image Classification

27 Jun 2022arXiv:2206.13156archive 2025-07-28

Yushan Zheng, Jun Li, Jun Shi, Fengying Xie, Zhiguo Jiang

Transformer has been widely used in histopathology whole slide image (WSI) classification for the purpose of tumor grading, prognosis analysis, etc. However, the design of token-wise self-attention and positional embedding strategy in the common Transformer limits the effectiveness and efficiency in the application to gigapixel histopathology images. In this paper, we propose a kernel attention Transformer (KAT) for histopathology WSI classification. The information transmission of the tokens is achieved by cross-attention between the tokens and a set of kernels related to a set of positional anchors on the WSI. Compared to the common Transformer structure, the proposed KAT can better describe the hierarchical context information of the local regions of the WSI and meanwhile maintains a lower computational complexity. The proposed method was evaluated on a gastric dataset with 2040 WSIs and an endometrial dataset with 2560 WSIs, and was compared with 6 state-of-the-art methods. The experimental results have demonstrated the proposed KAT is effective and efficient in the task of histopathology WSI classification and is superior to the state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/zhengyushan/kat.

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Classification Image Classification Prognosis image-classification

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Absolute Position Encodings Adam Attention BPE Dense Connections Dropout Label Smoothing Layer Normalization Linear Layer Multi-Head Attention Position-Wise Feed-Forward Layer Residual Connection Softmax Transformer

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