Prior-Anchored Debiasing for Long-Tailed Multi-Organ Pathology Report Generation
About
Automated pathology report generation from Whole Slide Images (WSIs) has attracted increasing attention in digital pathology. However, existing methods are predominantly developed under single-organ settings, overlooking the multi-organ scenarios encountered in clinical practice, where organ types typically follow a long-tailed distribution. To address this gap, we identify two critical biases: (1) visual representation bias, where the encoder favors head-class patterns over tail-class discriminative features, and (2) textual decoding bias, where the decoder overfits to head-class narrative patterns, yielding diagnostically unreliable outputs for tail-class organs. To mitigate these two biases, we propose a novel Prior-anchored multi-Organ pathology report Generation framework (PriOrGen). Specifically, a Visual-Prototype Anchored Bottleneck module leverages the information bottleneck principle with learnable anchor representations to selectively retain diagnostically relevant visual information while filtering out head-biased redundancy. Secondly, a Meta-Report Anchored Bank module constructs an organ-specific meta-report anchored bank and retrieves organ-faithful textual priors to steer the decoder away from head-class narrative patterns. Extensive experiments on a multi-organ pathology dataset demonstrate that our method effectively mitigates long-tail biases and achieves superior report generation performance across both head and tail organ categories compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pathology report generation | ML-Path BRCA (test) | BLEU Score25 | 9 | |
| Pathology report generation | ML-Path LUNG (test) | BLEU Score26.9 | 9 | |
| Pathology report generation | ML-Path KIDNEY (test) | BLEU Score (Mean)32.4 | 9 | |
| Pathology report generation | ML-Path THCA (test) | BLEU0.286 | 9 | |
| Pathology report generation | ML-Path COAD (test) | BLEU Score (Mean)0.259 | 9 | |
| Pathology report generation | ML-Path STAD (test) | BLEU Score (Mean)0.279 | 9 | |
| Pathology report generation | ML-Path MESO (test) | BLEU20.3 | 9 | |
| Pathology report generation | ML-Path CHOL (test) | BLEU Score21.3 | 9 | |
| Pathology report generation | ML-Path Mean (test) | BLEU0.273 | 9 | |
| Pathology report generation | ML-Path LIHC (test) | BLEU Score24.7 | 9 |