Quilt-LLaVA: Visual Instruction Tuning by Extracting Localized Narratives from Open-Source Histopathology Videos

Mehmet Saygin Seyfioglu, Wisdom O. Ikezogwo, Fatemeh Ghezloo, Ranjay Krishna, Linda Shapiro; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 13183-13192

Diagnosis in histopathology requires a global whole slide images (WSIs) analysis requiring pathologists to compound evidence from different WSI patches. The gigapixel scale of WSIs poses a challenge for histopathology multi-modal models. Training multi-model models for histopathology requires instruction tuning datasets which currently contain information for individual image patches without a spatial grounding of the concepts within each patch and without a wider view of the WSI. To bridge this gap we introduce QUILT-INSTRUCT a large-scale dataset of 107131 histopathology-specific instruction question/answer pairs grounded within diagnostically relevant image patches that make up the WSI. Our dataset is collected by leveraging educational histopathology videos from YouTube which provides spatial localization of narrations by automatically extracting the narrators' cursor positions. QUILT-INSTRUCT supports contextual reasoning by extracting diagnosis and supporting facts from the entire WSI. Using QUILT-INSTRUCT we train QUILT-LLAVA which can reason beyond the given single image patch enabling diagnostic reasoning across patches. To evaluate QUILT-LLAVA we propose a comprehensive evaluation dataset created from 985 images and 1283 human-generated question-answers. We also thoroughly evaluate QUILT-LLAVA using public histopathology datasets where QUILT-LLAVA significantly outperforms SOTA by over 10% on relative GPT-4 score and 4% and 9% on open and closed set VQA.