Toward Efficient Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation Using Only Low-Magnification Histopathological Images
2026-07-12 • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computer Vision and Pattern RecognitionMachine Learning
AI summaryⓘ
The authors studied whether low-resolution pathology images can still help computers accurately identify tissue structures without needing detailed labels. They took high-res images, made them lower in resolution, then tried to reconstruct them back to see how this affected computer analysis. They found that just measuring image quality doesn't always show how well the computer can find small structures, and there is a point where lowering resolution hurts detection a lot. Their work helps guide how to store pathology images efficiently without losing too much useful information for automatic analysis.
Whole-slide imagesHistopathologyWeakly supervised segmentationImage resolutionImage reconstructionInterpolationDigital pathologyImage-level labelsHigh-resolution imagingAutomated analysis
Authors
Dung Minh Do, Nhat-Thanh Huynh, Duc Minh Huynh, Doanh C. Bui, Khang Nguyen
Abstract
Whole-slide images (WSIs) provide rich tissue-level and cellular-level information, but storing and transmitting high-magnification pathology data is resource-intensive. Moreover, annotating WSIs at the pixel level is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Therefore, it is important to investigate whether low-magnification pathology images with limited annotations (i.e., image-level instead of pixel-level labels) can achieve performance comparable to high-magnification images. This paper presents a systematic benchmark study on weakly supervised histopathological image segmentation under different low-resolution storage settings. Starting from high-resolution image patches, we simulate lower-magnification inputs and reconstruct them to the original size using interpolation and deep learning-based reconstruction methods before applying the weakly-supervised segmentation pipeline. This framework enables a quantitative evaluation of how weakly supervised methods respond to different levels of resolution degradation. Experimental results show that reconstruction quality metrics alone are insufficient to predict downstream segmentation performance. In particular, the study identifies a critical degradation point where the localization of small-scale structures declines significantly. These findings provide practical guidance for designing efficient digital pathology storage systems while maintaining reliable automated analysis. Code is available at https://github.com/Dung-Dx/LowMagWSS