Papers for

biomedical ai tool developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Dense token clustering improves detection of sparse disease signs

One Tile, Multiple Instances: Rethinking MIL for Sparse Diagnostic Evidence

Abstract: In weakly supervised Whole Slide Image (WSI) classification, feature extractors typically compress each image tile into a single global embedding. Consequently, slide-level aggregators are restricted to this coarse tile scale, concealing fine-grained sub-tile evidence from the attention mechanism. We introduce DI-MIL, a framework that decouples encoding context from instance granularity through decomposed instances. By clustering dense spatial tokens from a frozen foundation model within each tile, DI-MIL converts a single tile into multiple independently weighted instance embeddings. As a training-free post-encoding module, DI-MIL integrates seamlessly into existing pipelines without requiring re-encoding or downstream architectural modifications. We evaluate DI-MIL on cytopathology, a challenging testbed where sparse diagnostic signals are easily diluted within standard tiles. Across four datasets, three frozen foundation models, and two attention-based aggregators, DI-MIL demonstrates consistent efficacy, improving 67 of 72 metric-level comparisons, with the largest mean gains reaching 3.64 points under cytopathology-specific backbones. In a broader comparison against seven representative MIL baselines, DI-MIL paired with ACMIL achieves highest mean performance in 33 of 36 backbone-dataset-metric comparisons. Ablations show that direct smaller tiling inflates the extracted tile count by up to 43.3$\times$ with non-monotonic performance, whereas DI-MIL incurs zero additional image-extraction overhead while achieving the strongest overall results. These results establish instance construction as an orthogonal design dimension in MIL, supporting DI-MIL as a cost-efficient solution under sparse diagnostic evidence.

Sun 4 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionMachine Learning
The gist
When computers analyze very large medical images, they usually simplify each small part into a single number, which can hide tiny but important clues. The authors propose DI-MIL, which breaks each small part into several pieces to look at more detailed information without extra effort. This method works well on hard tasks like spotting rare disease signals in cell samples and improves performance across many tests. DI-MIL fits easily into existing setups without needing complicated changes or more computing power.
Open → 2610.04853v1