Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 2608.16959

MagViT: Interpretable Multi-Magnification Transformers with Patient-Level Model Selection for Breast Histopathology

Abstract

Breast cancer is one of the most common types of cancer among women around the world. Rapid detection and early treatment can hinder its progress to more complex stages and can impede its spread to other parts of the body. Histopathological image classification is the most common task in cancer detection due to its robustness in analyzing cellular data. Breast histopathology classification requires handling both multi-scale tissue morphology and clinically relevant generalization beyond the source domain. This paper presents MagViT, an interpretable multi-magnification transformer framework with scale-gated fusion and patient-level model selection. The model uses four BreakHis magnifications (40X, 100X, 200X, 400X) and extracts per-scale representations with a ViT backbone, and combines them via a learnable gate that masks missing scales. Patient-level five-fold cross-validation with a fixed seed has been run and compared with three architectural branches. The most accurate branch is then selected as the final model due to the strongest patient-level accuracy while retaining the simplest fusion pathway. On BreakHis, our architecture achieves a mean image accuracy of 0.9191, a mean patient accuracy of 0.9643, and a mean macro-F1 of 0.9042. External transfer experiments provide preliminary evidence of cross-dataset generalization under controlled adaptation settings on BUSI (image accuracy 0.8306, macro-F1 0.7480, patient accuracy 0.8291) and IDC (image accuracy 0.8577, macro-F1 0.8191, patient accuracy 0.8372). Grad-CAM visualization indicates that the model focuses on diagnostically significant and meaningful regions across magnifications. Relative to prior ViT-centered BreakHis work, this study emphasizes patient-level selection and cross-dataset robustness under a reproducible protocol.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Nabil Ashab, Soumit Kumar Kundu, Saif Mahmud Parvez, Shahadat Hossain Sohag, Bidhan Biswas, Nazmus Subha. 2026-08-16. MagViT: Interpretable Multi-Magnification Transformers with Patient-Level Model Selection for Breast Histopathology. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16959

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

IViT: A Novel Interpretable Visual Transformer for Skin Disease Detection

The clinical diagnosis of skin diseases is susceptible to interference from inter-class similarity of skin lesions, and over-reliance on clinicians'experience easily leads to subjective bias. Although existing deep learning aided diagnosis methods achieve competitive accuracy, they suffer from the black-box opacity of Vision Transformer (ViT) and poor adaptability to medical few-shot scenarios. Moreover, mainstream explainable algorithms generally face the bottleneck of significant accuracy degradation when improving interpretability. This paper proposes an interpretable ViT (IViT) constrained by Quadratic Programming (QP). The introduced pre-trained transfer learning adapts to few-shot feature extraction. A discrete QP feature selection framework is constructed to screen generic and discriminative features consistent with clinical diagnostic logic. A multi-objective loss function is designed to reduce feature redundancy and optimize activation distribution while preserving classification performance. Experimental results on six standard skin disease datasets show that IViT achieves an accuracy of 93.80%, only 0.21% lower than the baseline, with feature redundancy reduced by 29.5%. Its core activation regions are consistent with clinically concerned lesion areas. The proposed model balances accuracy and interpretability, providing a reliable solution for the clinical deployment of few-shot intelligent skin disease diagnosis.

eess.IV

Automated Distinction of Intimal and Medial Intracranial Arterial Calcification from CT Head

Intracranial arterial calcifications (IACs) are a common finding on clinical non-contrast enhanced head CT scans and are associated with neurovascular disease. Calcifications can occur in the intimal or medial layer of the arterial wall, subtypes that differ in aetiology and may have distinct clinical relevance. These subtypes can be visually distinguished by radiologists based on the shape of the calcifications. We investigate three automated approaches for subtype classification of IAC from head CT-derived segmentation masks: (1) an automated adaptation of the established radiological visual score, (2) a sphericity-based method, and (3) a method based on shape embeddings extracted by a medical shape foundation model. All approaches use the same lightweight classification pipeline on top of the features they compute and are evaluated using 5-fold cross-validation. The three methods achieved comparable performance, with the embedding-based approach yielding the best overall results with a weighted F1 (mean $\pm$ SD) of up to 71.5 $\pm$ 3.7 for a single artery and 59.8 $\pm$ 1.7 for the joint artery classification. Performance was largely preserved when using automated instead of manual IAC segmentation masks, and we found the difference in weighted F1 not significant. Our results show that fully automated IAC subtype quantification from head CT is feasible and remains robust to the use of manual and automated IAC segmentation masks. Code at https://github.com/bjin96/iac-subtyping.

eess.IV

Recasting the Destroy Step of Large Neighborhood Search as Dense Segmentation

Large neighborhood search improves an incumbent by releasing selected variables and repairing the resulting subproblem under a time limit. FOVEA casts variable selection as dense semantic segmentation on a fixed $128\times128$ canvas. A small U-Net reads twelve semantic channels and predicts cell scores, which are decoded into a variable set subject to a fixed variable budget. Family-specific layouts connect the search state to the canvas, while one set of network weights serves four problem families. The FP32 network input occupies $786$\,kB across instance sizes. Our analysis bounds constraint coupling for spatially coherent regions, gives a rank certificate for rounds with zero possible improvement, and bounds the coupling advantage attainable on an expander family. On the tested families and hardware, FOVEA trails the strongest graph encoder at $10^{4}$ variables and overtakes it near $1.5\times10^{4}$; the cost model provides an approximate crossover estimate. At larger sizes, where the graph-encoder baselines exceed device memory, FOVEA reduces the primal integral by $12$ to $16\%$ relative to the best runnable baselines. On the expander family, FOVEA performs comparably to random selection, with a coupling advantage close to one.

eess.IV