Reducing Redundancy in Whole-Slide Image Patching for Scalable Indexing and Retrieval
About
The rapid growth of digital pathology has created an urgent need for efficient indexing and retrieval of whole slide images (WSIs). This need is intensified by emerging generative AI workflows, particularly retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which require dependable similarity search to support high-stakes clinical decision-making. Yet the substantial cost of high-performance storage limits the scalability and accessibility of WSI indexing for many healthcare institutions. Consequently, methods that can reduce storage demands while preserving retrieval accuracy have become a critical research priority. We propose ARReST (Antithetical Redundancy Reduction Strategy), a principled oppositional framework that leverages redundancy across dissimilar tissue classes to markedly decrease the number of patches that must be indexed from each WSI. Instead of eliminating only within-class duplicates, ARReST identifies antithetical patches-those whose representations contribute minimally to cross-class discrimination-and prunes them from the searchable archive. This targeted reduction substantially compresses the index without sacrificing morphological diversity or retrieval fidelity. By minimizing superfluous patch representations, ARReST reduces storage footprint, lowers computational overhead, and accelerates similarity search across large pathology repositories. Extensive experiments on TCGA repository (The Cancer Genome Atlas with 21 organs) demonstrate that ARReST achieves significant index compression while maintaining competitive retrieval performance. The observed storage savings of 3% to 60% (14%$\pm$13%) can be reliably achieved without compromising retrieval performance for many organs. The proposed strategy enables scalable, cost-efficient WSI indexing and is well-suited for next-generation retrieval-driven clinical AI systems.