When an Image is Worth 1,024 x 1,024 Words: A Case Study in
  Computational Pathology
Wenhui Wang Shuming Ma Hanwen Xu Naoto Usuyama Jiayu Ding Hoifung Poon Furu Wei
This technical report presents LongViT, a vision Transformer that can process
gigapixel images in an end-to-end manner. Specifically, we split the gigapixel
image into a sequence of millions of patches and project them linearly into
embeddings. LongNet is then employed to model the extremely long sequence,
generating representations that capture both short-range and long-range
dependencies. The linear computation complexity of LongNet, along with its
distributed algorithm, enables us to overcome the constraints of both
computation and memory. We apply LongViT in the field of computational
pathology, aiming for cancer diagnosis and prognosis within gigapixel
whole-slide images. Experimental results demonstrate that LongViT effectively
encodes gigapixel images and outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on
cancer subtyping and survival prediction. Code and models will be available at
https://aka.ms/LongViT.