HemaHier: Chain-Conditioned Ordinal Hierarchies for Lineage-Aware Bone-Marrow Cytology

MCML Authors

Peter Schüffler

Prof. Dr.

Core PI

Computational Pathology

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.

inproceedings BSJ+26

---

COMPAYL @MICCAI 2026

Workshop on Computational Pathology with Multimodal Data at the 29th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention. Strasbourg, France, Sep 27-Oct 01, 2026. To be published. Preprint available.

---

Authors

A. Bozorgpour • P. J. Schüffler • E. Jost • D. Merhof

---

Links

URL

---

Research Area

 C1 | Medicine