Weakly supervised multi-modal contrastive learning framework for predicting the HER2 scores in breast cancer

Human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) is an important biomarker for prognosis and prediction of treatment response in breast cancer (BC). HER2 scoring is typically evaluated by pathologist microscopic observation on immunohistochemistry (IHC) images, which is labor-intensive and results in observational biases among different pathologists. Most existing methods generally use hand-crafted features or deep learning models in unimodal (hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) or IHC) to predict HER2 scores through supervised or weakly supervised learning. Consequently, the information from different modalities is not effectively integrated into feature learning which can help improve HER2 scoring performance. In this paper, we propose a novel weakly supervised multi-modal contrastive learning (WSMCL) framework to predict the HER2 scores in BC at the whole slide image (WSI) level. It aims to leverage multi-modal (H&E and IHC) joint learning under the weak supervision of WSI label to achieve the HER2 score prediction. Specifically, the patch features within H&E and IHC WSIs are respectively extracted and then the multi-head self-attention (MHSA) is used to explore the global dependencies of the patches within each modality. The patch features corresponding to top-k and bottom-k attention scores generated by MHSA in each modality are selected as the candidates for multi-modal joint learning. Particularly, a multi-modal attentive contrastive learning (MACL) module is designed to guarantee the semantic alignment of the candidate features from different modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the proposed WSMCL has the better HER2 scoring performance and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/HFUT-miaLab/WSMCL.