Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences

The work presents a weakly-supervised, detection-free multiple instance learning framework that uses dual-branch gated attention pooling to make slide-level predictions on whole-slide cervical cytology images, treating each slide as a bag of local instance patches so that single-cell bounding boxes or pixel-level annotations are not required; evaluated on internal multi-center cohorts (SIPaKMeD, Herlev, and CRIC) and on the unannotated, out-of-distribution Mendeley LBC validation cohort processed via an unsupervised marker-controlled watershed pipeline, it reports that the lightweight MobileNetV2 backbone optimizes in-distribution multi-center accuracy (90.96% accuracy, 0.9800 ROC-AUC) while the higher-capacity Xception provides better out-of-distribution robustness under domain shift (80.

The work presents a weakly-supervised, detection-free multiple instance learning framework that uses dual-branch gated attention pooling to make slide-level predictions on whole-slide cervical cytology images, treating each slide as a bag of local instance patches so that single-cell bounding boxes or pixel-level annotations are not required; evaluated on internal multi-center cohorts (SIPaKMeD, Herlev, and CRIC) and on the unannotated, out-of-distribution Mendeley LBC validation cohort processed via an unsupervised marker-controlled watershed pipeline, it reports that the lightweight MobileNetV2 backbone optimizes in-distribution multi-center accuracy (90.96% accuracy, 0.9800 ROC-AUC) while the higher-capacity Xception provides better out-of-distribution robustness under domain shift (80.