# Learn like a Pathologist: Curriculum Learning by Annotator Agreement for Histopathology Image Classification Source: [Learn like a Pathologist: Curriculum Learning by Annotator Agreement for Histopathology Image Classification]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-25T22:36:00.183Z Authors: Jerry Wei, Arief Suriawinata, Bing Ren, Xiaoying Liu, Mikhail Lisovsky, Louis Vaickus, Charles Brown, Michael Baker, Mustafa Nasir-Moin, Naofumi Tomita, Lorenzo Torresani, Jason Wei, Saeed Hassanpour Published: 2020-09-29T00:25:21.000Z ## Abstract Applying curriculum learning requires both a range of difficulty in data and a method for determining the difficulty of examples. In many tasks, however, satisfying these requirements can be a formidable challenge. In this paper, we contend that histopathology image classification is a compelling use case for curriculum learning. Based on the nature of histopathology images, a range of difficulty inherently exists among examples, and, since medical datasets are often labeled by multiple annotators, annotator agreement can be used as a natural proxy for the difficulty of a given example. Hence, we propose a simple curriculum learning method that trains on progressively-harder images as determined by annotator agreement. We evaluate our hypothesis on the challenging and clinically-important task of colorectal polyp classification. Whereas vanilla training achieves an AUC of 83.7% for this task, a model trained with our proposed curriculum learning approach achieves an AUC of 88.2%, an improvement of 4.5%. Our work aims to inspire researchers to think more creatively and rigorously when choosing contexts for applying curriculum learning. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()