  Vulvovaginal candidiasis (VVC) is the most prevalent human candidal
infection, estimated to afflict approximately 75% of all women at least once in
their lifetime. It will lead to several symptoms including pruritus, vaginal
soreness, and so on. Automatic whole slide image (WSI) classification is highly
demanded, for the huge burden of disease control and prevention. However, the
WSI-based computer-aided VCC screening method is still vacant due to the scarce
labeled data and unique properties of candida. Candida in WSI is challenging to
be captured by conventional classification models due to its distinctive
elongated shape, the small proportion of their spatial distribution, and the
style gap from WSIs. To make the model focus on the candida easier, we propose
an attention-guided method, which can obtain a robust diagnosis classification
model. Specifically, we first use a pre-trained detection model as prior
instruction to initialize the classification model. Then we design a Skip
Self-Attention module to refine the attention onto the fined-grained features
of candida. Finally, we use a contrastive learning method to alleviate the
overfitting caused by the style gap of WSIs and suppress the attention to false
positive regions. Our experimental results demonstrate that our framework
achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code and example data are available at
https://github.com/cjdbehumble/MICCAI2023-VVC-Screening.
