Domain-Specific Interactive Prompting for Generalized Nuclei Classification

Accurate nuclei classification serves as a critical cornerstone for disease diagnosis and treatment, yet challenged by the heterogeneity of tissue types, staining procedures, and imaging techniques. Recently, vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive success in the natural image field and advanced potential in medical imaging. However, the adaptation of VLMs to nuclei classification still poses several challenges, including limited generalization capability and coarse image-text feature alignment. In this paper, we propose SIGNPrompt, a domain-Specific Interactive Prompt learning framework for Generalized Nuclei classification. Specifically, to unleash the generalization capability of VLM-based models, we introduce a prior-guided domain adapting module that integrates nuclei prior information from the large language model (LLM), enabling flexible and robust adaptation to the inherent heterogeneity across pathological domains. Moreover, we develop a multi-modal interactive prompting mechanism to refine image-text feature alignment by leveraging the interdependence between visual and language prompting, thus enhancing the discriminability of nuclei categories. In addition, a simple yet effective noise-adding strategy is proposed to mitigate the overfitting problem in prompt learning. Extensive experiments on diverse public benchmarks and challenging zero-shot scenarios validate that SIGNPrompt consistently outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in both accuracy and generalization.