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 nonindependent 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) WSI contains multiple morphological structures, each corresponding to a distinct style. (2) Performing style transfer may potentially shift the region of interests (RoIs) in the augmented WSIs. 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. Our code is available at https://lalakitchen.github.io/HistoFS/ .