HistoFS: Non-IID Histopathologic Whole Slide Image Classification via Federated Style Transfer with RoI-Preserving

Federated learning for pathological whole slide image (WSI) classification allows multiple clients to train a global multiple instance learning (MIL) model without sharing their privacy-sensitive WSIs.To accommodate the non-independent and identically distributed (non-i.i.d.) feature shifts, cross-client style transfer has been popularly used but is subject to two fundamental issues: (1) WSIs contain multiple morphological structures due to tissue heterogeneity, and (2) the region of interests (RoIs) is not guaranteed, particularly after augmenting local WSIs data trough style transfer. To address these challenges, we propose HistoFS, a federated learning framework for computational pathology on non-i.i.d. feature shifts in WSI classification. Specifically, we introduce pseudo bag styles that capture multiple style variations within a single WSI. In addition, an authenticity module is introduced to ensure that RoIs are preserved, allowing local models to learn WSIs with diverse styles while maintaining essential RoIs. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of HistoFS over state-of-the-art methods on three clinical datasets.