Weakly Supervised Representation Learning for Endomicroscopy Image Analysis

This paper proposes a weakly-supervised representation learning framework for probe-based confocal laser endomicroscopy (pCLE). Unlike previous frame-based and mosaic-based methods, the proposed framework adopts deep convolutional neural networks and integrates frame-based feature learning, global diagnosis prediction and local tumor detection into a unified end-to-end model. The latent objects in pCLE mosaics are inferred via semantic label propagation and the deep convolutional neural networks are trained with a composite loss function. Experiments on 700 pCLE samples demonstrate that the proposed method trained with only global supervisions is able to achieve higher accuracy on global and local diagnosis prediction.