DISC: Latent Diffusion Models with Self-Distillation from Separated Conditions for Prostate Cancer Grading

Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) can generate high-fidelity images from noise, offering a promising approach for augmenting histopathology images. Synthetic images can be used for several downstream tasks, for example for the training cancer grading models. While previous works successfully generated high-fidelity histopathology images using LDMs, the generation of image tiles to improve pixel-level prostate cancer grading has not yet been explored. Additionally, LDMs face challenges in accurately generating admixtures of multiple cancer grades in a tile when conditioned by a tile mask. In this study, we train specific LDMs to generate synthetic tiles that contain multiple Gleason Grades (GGs) by leveraging pixel-wise annotations in input tiles. We introduce a novel framework named Self-Distillation from Separated Conditions (DISC) that generates GG patterns guided by GG masks. Finally, we deploy a training framework for pixel-level prostate cancer grading, where synthetic tiles are effectively utilized to improve the cancer grading performance of existing models. As a result, this work surpasses previous works in two domains: 1) our LDMs enhanced with DISC produce more accurate tiles in terms of GG patterns, and 2) our training scheme, by incorporating synthetic data, significantly improves the generalization of models for prostate cancer grading.