Beyond H&E: Unlocking Pathological Insights with Polarization via Self-supervised Learning

Histopathology image analysis is fundamental to digital pathology, with hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining as the gold standard for diagnostic and prognostic assessments. While H&E imaging effectively highlights cellular and tissue structures, it lacks sensitivity to birefringence and tissue anisotropy, which are crucial for assessing collagen organization, fiber alignment, and microstructural alterations--key indicators of tumor progression, fibrosis, and other pathological conditions. To bridge this gap, we propose PolarHE, a dual modality fusion framework that integrates H&E with polarization imaging, leveraging the polarization ability to enhance tissue characterization. Our approach employs a feature decomposition strategy to disentangle common and modality specific features, ensuring effective multimodal representation learning. Through comprehensive validation, our approach significantly outperforms previous methods, achieving an accuracy of 86.70% on the Chaoyang dataset and 89.06% on the MHIST dataset. Moreover, polarization property visualization reveals distinct optical signatures of pathological tissues, highlighting its diagnostic potential. t-SNE visualizations further confirm our model effectively captures both shared and unique modality features, reinforcing the complementary nature of polarization imaging. These results demonstrate that polarization imaging is a powerful and underutilized modality in computational pathology, enriching feature representation and improving diagnostic accuracy. PolarHE establishes a promising direction for multimodal learning, paving the way for more interpretable and generalizable pathology models. Our code will be released after paper acceptance.