Graph-Based Classification of Lung Cancer Histopathology Using SimCLR Feature Extraction and Graph Attention Networks
摘要
Histopathological image analysis is essential for cancer diagnosis, but accurately segmenting and classifying cancer cells is a complex task due to structural variations in medical images. This study implements a two-stage pipeline that integrates self-supervised learning with graph-based classification to enhance performance while minimizing reliance on labeled data. In the first stage, SimCLR—a contrastive learning framework—is integrated with EfficientNet-B4 to extract meaningful and invariant feature representations from unlabeled histopathological images. The extracted features are then used to construct a k-nearest neighbor graph, which serves as input to a multi-layer graph Attention Network (GAT) for classification. In the second stage, the graph is processed by a multi-layer Graph Attention Network (GAT), which dynamically weighs neighboring nodes to perform accurate classification. The architecture incorporates adaptive graph generation, efficient augmentation pipelines, and a cosine-annealed learning rate for training stability. The self-supervised nature of the method reduces the dependency on labeled data, offering a scalable and robust solution for histopathological analysis.