{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/sam-mil-a-spatial-contextual-aware-multiple","title":"SAM-MIL: A Spatial Contextual Aware Multiple Instance Learning Approach for Whole Slide Image Classification","arxiv_id":"2407.17689","date":"2024-07-25","proceeding":null,"authors":["Heng Fang","Sheng Huang","Wenhao Tang","Luwen Huangfu","Bo Liu"],"abstract":"Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) represents the predominant framework in Whole Slide Image (WSI) classification, covering aspects such as sub-typing, diagnosis, and beyond. Current MIL models predominantly rely on instance-level features derived from pretrained models such as ResNet. These models segment each WSI into independent patches and extract features from these local patches, leading to a significant loss of global spatial context and restricting the model's focus to merely local features. To address this issue, we propose a novel MIL framework, named SAM-MIL, that emphasizes spatial contextual awareness and explicitly incorporates spatial context by extracting comprehensive, image-level information. The Segment Anything Model (SAM) represents a pioneering visual segmentation foundational model that can capture segmentation features without the need for additional fine-tuning, rendering it an outstanding tool for extracting spatial context directly from raw WSIs. Our approach includes the design of group feature extraction based on spatial context and a SAM-Guided Group Masking strategy to mitigate class imbalance issues. We implement a dynamic mask ratio for different segmentation categories and supplement these with representative group features of categories. Moreover, SAM-MIL divides instances to generate additional pseudo-bags, thereby augmenting the training set, and introduces consistency of spatial context across pseudo-bags to further enhance the model's performance. Experimental results on the CAMELYON-16 and TCGA Lung Cancer datasets demonstrate that our proposed SAM-MIL model outperforms existing mainstream methods in WSIs classification. Our open-source implementation code is is available at https://github.com/FangHeng/SAM-MIL.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.17689v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.17689v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"sam-mil-a-spatial-contextual-aware-multiple","repo_url":"https://github.com/fangheng/sam-mil","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"Image Classification"},{"task_slug":"multiple-instance-learning","task_name":"Multiple Instance Learning"},{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"image-classification"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"average-pooling","method_name":"Average Pooling"},{"method_slug":"convolution","method_name":"Convolution"},{"method_slug":"focus","method_name":"Focus"},{"method_slug":"global-average-pooling","method_name":"Global Average Pooling"},{"method_slug":"kaiming-initialization","method_name":"Kaiming Initialization"},{"method_slug":"max-pooling","method_name":"Max Pooling"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}