Unleashing the Infinity Power of Geometry: A Novel Geometry-Aware Transformer (Goat) for Whole Slide Histopathology Image Analysis

The histopathology analysis is of great significance for the diagnosis and prognosis of cancers, however, it has great challenges due to the enormous heterogeneity of gigapixel whole slide images (WSIs) and the intricate representation of pathological features. However, recent methods have not adequately exploited geometrical representation in WSIs which is significant in disease diagnosis. Therefore, we proposed a novel weakly-supervised framework, Geometry-Aware Transformer (GOAT), in which we urge the model to pay attention to the geometric characteristics within the tumor microenvironment which often serve as potent indicators. In addition, a context-aware attention mechanism is designed to extract and enhance the morphological features within WSIs. Extensive experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method is capable of consistently reaching superior classification outcomes for gigapixel whole slide images.