Context-aware Skin Cancer Epithelial Cell Classification with Scalable Graph Transformers

Whole-slide images (WSIs) from cancer patients contain rich information that can be used for medical diagnosis or to follow treatment progress. To automate their analysis, numerous deep learning methods based on convolutional neural networks and Vision Transformers have been developed and have achieved strong performance in segmentation and classification tasks. However, due to the large size and complex cellular organization of WSIs, these models rely on patch-based representations, losing vital tissue-level context. We propose using scalable Graph Transformers on a full-WSI cell graph for classification. We evaluate this methodology on a challenging task: the classification of healthy versus tumor epithelial cells in cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC), where both cell types exhibit very similar morphologies and are therefore difficult to differentiate for image-based approaches. We first compared image-based and graph-based methods on a single WSI. Graph Transformer models SGFormer and DIFFormer achieved balanced accuracies of 85.2 plus or minus 1.5 (plus or minus standard error) and 85.1 plus or minus 2.5 in 3-fold cross-validation, respectively, whereas the best image-based method reached 81.2 plus or minus 3.0. By evaluating several node feature configurations, we found that the most informative representation combined morphological and texture features as well as the cell classes of non-epithelial cells, highlighting the importance of the surrounding cellular context. We then extended our work to train on several WSIs from several patients. To address the computational constraints of image-based models, we extracted four 2560 times 2560 pixel patches from each image and converted them into graphs. In this setting, DIFFormer achieved a balanced accuracy of 83.6 plus or minus 1.9 (3-fold cross-validation), while the state-of-the-art image-based model CellViT256 reached 78.1 plus or minus 0.5.