Important

STAMP v1.1.0 now uses PyTorch's FlashAttentionV2 implementation, which substantially improves memory efficiency when training. With this update, you cannot deploy a saved model from STAMP version ≤ 1.0.3 with this or subsequent versions. Therefore, it is recommended to only update to the latest version of STAMP when starting new experiments. Additionally, the optimizer has been updated from Adam to AdamW. Lastly, STAMP has built-in support for the UNI Feature extractor. Using it will require a Hugging Face account with granted access to the UNI model. For details on fair use, licensing and accessing the UNI model weights, refer to the UNI GitHub repository. Note that the installation instructions and results within the STAMP Nature Protocols paper refer to v1.0.3 of the software. The README file will always contain the most up-to-date installation instructions.

STAMP protocol

A protocol for Solid Tumor Associative Modeling in Pathology. This repository contains the accompanying code for the steps described in the Nature Protocols paper:

From whole-slide image to biomarker prediction: end-to-end weakly supervised deep learning in computational pathology

The code can be executed either in a local environment, or in a containerized environment (preferred in clusters).

Using a local environment

For setting up a local environment, note that the following steps are for Ubuntu Linux systems. For other operating systems such as Windows, MacOS or other Linux distributions, it is recommend to use the containerized environment as described below.

First, install OpenSlide using either the command below or the official installation instructions:

apt update && apt install -y openslide-tools libgl1-mesa-glx # libgl1-mesa-glx is needed for OpenCV

Second, install conda on your local computer, create an environment with Python 3.10, and activate it:

conda create -n stamp python=3.10
conda activate stamp
conda install -c conda-forge libstdcxx-ng=12

Then, install the STAMP package via pip:

pip install git+https://github.com/KatherLab/STAMP

Once installed, you will be able to run the command line interface directly using the stamp command.

Next, initialize STAMP and obtain the required configuration file, config.yaml, in your current working directory, by running the following command:

stamp init

To download required resources such as the weights of the feature extractor, run the following command:

stamp setup

Note

If you select a different feature extractor withing the configuration file, such as UNI, you will need to re-run the previous setup command to initiate the downloading step of the UNI feature extractor weights. This will trigger a prompt asking for your Hugging Face access key for the UNI model weights.

Using the container

First, install Go and Singularity on your local machine using the official installation instructions. Note that the High-Performance Cluster (HPC) has Go and Singularity pre-installed, and do not require installation.

Build container from scratch (requires root)

Second, build the container first on your local machine with (fake) root access:

sudo singularity build STAMP_container.sif setup/container.def

Note that the container is approximately 6 GB in size.

Download pre-built container

Alternatively, lab members with access to the ZIH server can download the pre-built container into the base STAMP directory from:

/glw/ekfz_proj/STAMP_container.sif

Finally, to download required resources such as the weights of the CTransPath feature extractor, run the following command in the base directory of the protocol:

singularity run --nv -B /mnt:/mnt STAMP_container.sif "stamp --config /path/to/config.yaml setup"

Note that the binding of filesystems (-B) should be adapted to your own system. GPU acceleration (--nv) should be enabled if GPUs are available in the system, but is optional.

Running

Available commands are:

stamp init       # create a new configuration file in the current directory
stamp setup      # download required resources
stamp config     # print resolved configuration
stamp preprocess # normalization and feature extraction with CTransPath
stamp crossval   # train n_splits models using cross-validation
stamp train      # train single model
stamp deploy     # deploy a model on another test set
stamp statistics # compute stats including ROC curves
stamp heatmaps   # generate heatmaps

Note

By default, STAMP will use the configuration file config.yaml in the current working directory (or, if that does not exist, it will use the default STAMP configuration file shipped with this package). If you want to use a different configuration file, use the --config command line option, i.e. stamp --config some/other/file.yaml train. Note that the --config option must be supplied before any of the subcommands. You may also run stamp init to create a local config.yaml in the current working directory initialized to the default settings.

Reference

If you find our work useful in your research or if you use parts of this code please consider citing our Nature Protocols publication:

@Article{ElNahhas2024,
author={El Nahhas, Omar S. M. and van Treeck, Marko and W{\"o}lflein, Georg and Unger, Michaela and Ligero, Marta and Lenz, Tim and Wagner, Sophia J. and Hewitt, Katherine J. and Khader, Firas and Foersch, Sebastian and Truhn, Daniel and Kather, Jakob Nikolas},
title={From whole-slide image to biomarker prediction: end-to-end weakly supervised deep learning in computational pathology},
journal={Nature Protocols},
year={2024},
month={Sep},
day={16},
issn={1750-2799},
doi={10.1038/s41596-024-01047-2},
url={https://doi.org/10.1038/s41596-024-01047-2}
}