MFTrans: A Multi-Resolution Fusion Transformer for Robust Tumor Segmentation in Whole Slide Images

Abstract

Accurate tumor segmentation in whole slide image (WSI) is essential for histopathological diagnosis and research but the traditional manual analysis is labor-intensive and prone to variability. Furthermore many artificial models focus on specific magnification images limiting the detailed information available for segmentation. To address these challenges we propose MFTrans a novel multi-resolution fusion transformer with a CNN-based architecture designed for efficient tumor segmentation in WSI. Inspired by the diagnostic procedures of expert pathologists MFTrans integrates both high- and low-magnification images capturing detailed local features and broader contextual relationships through a dual-branch architecture. The model employs a global token transformer and cross-attention mechanism to fuse hierarchical features from dual branches to improve segmentation performance. We evaluate MFTrans on three real-world WSI datasets: Camelyon16 PAIP2019 and Catholic Uijeongbu St. Mary's hospital dataset demonstrating its superior segmentation performance over state-of-the-art methods in balanced and imbalanced setups. These results highlight MFTrans's effectiveness in medical image analysis and its generalizability across different datasets making it a robust tool for automated cancer diagnostics. Our code is available at https://github.com/aimed-gist/MFTrans.