Distilling Genomic Knowledge into Whole Slide Imaging for Glioma Molecular Classification

The molecular classification of adult-type diffuse gliomas is essential for determining appropriate therapeutic strategies, but genomic sequencing remains costly. Recent advances in digital pathology and deep learning have led to several studies exploring molecular classification using multiple instance learning (MIL) on whole slide images (WSIs). However, achieving optimal classification performance using only histological slides is challenging due to the lack of guidance from genomic data. In this study, we propose a teacher-student distillation framework for glioma molecular classification using WSIs. Our method leverages a pretrained self-normalizing neural network (SNN) as the genomic teacher model, which selects genes based on survival analysis-driven criteria to guide the MIL-based student model in learning effective histological representations. During training, both genomic and pathological data are utilized, while inference relies solely on WSIs. Experimental validation on the TCGA GBM-LGG datasets shows that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) MIL models, highlighting its effectiveness in glioma diagnostic subtyping using WSIs.