Abstract
Bone-marrow cytology is inherently structured: each cell belongs
to a hematopoietic lineage, and many cell types lie on ordered
maturation trajectories. Standard flat classifiers ignore this structure,
treating a mild same-lineage confusion the same as a severe cross-lineage
mistake and predicting only discrete labels. We propose HemaHier, an
ordinal-hierarchical prediction head for a frozen or lightly adapted cytology
foundation model. Its central component is a chain-conditioned
maturity score that reads a single maturity value under a per-chain query,
supervised only on biologically valid healthy chains, while dysplastic and
off-chain cell types remain classes but are excluded from maturity supervision.
Fine and lineage predictions are coupled through a shared
posterior that guarantees hierarchical consistency, and a staged objective
first stabilizes recognition, then adds lineage and maturity supervision.
On three bone-marrow datasets under a shared ontology, HemaHier
achieves competitive recognition while reducing biologically severe errors
Links to Paper and Supplementary Materials
Main Paper (Open Access Version): https://papers.miccai.org/miccai-2026-sat/paper/COMPAYL_054.pdf
SharedIt Link: Not yet available
SpringerLink (DOI): Not yet available
Supplementary Material: Not Submitted
Link to Open Review
BibTex
@InProceedings{BozAfs_HemaHier_MICCAISAT2026,
author = { Bozorgpour, Afshin AND Schüffler, Peter J. AND Jost, Edgar AND Merhof, Dorit},
title = { { HemaHier: Chain-Conditioned Ordinal Hierarchies for Lineage-Aware Bone-Marrow Cytology } },
booktitle = {Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention -- MICCAI 2026 Workshops and Challenges},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Springer Nature Switzerland},
volume = {LNCS 17251},
month = {pending},
page = {pending}
}