Transfer learning may explain pigeons' ability to detect cancer in histopathology.

Pigeons' unexpected competence in learning to categorize unseen histopathological images has remained an unexplained discovery for almost a decade (Levenson et al 2015 PLoS One 10 e0141357). Could it be that knowledge transferred from their bird's-eye views of the earth's surface gleaned during flight contributes to this ability? Employing a simulation-based verification strategy, we recapitulate this biological phenomenon with a machine-learning analog. We model pigeons' visual experience during flight with the self-supervised pre-training of a deep neural network on BirdsEyeViewNet; our large-scale aerial imagery dataset. As an analog of the differential food reinforcement performed in Levenson et al 's study 2015 PLoS One 10 e0141357), we apply transfer learning from this pre-trained model to the same Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) histopathology and radiology images and tasks that the pigeons were trained and tested on. The study demonstrates that pre-training neural networks with bird's-eye view data results in close agreement with pigeons' performance. These results support transfer learning as a reasonable computational model of pigeon representation learning. This is further validated with six large-scale downstream classification tasks using H&E stained whole slide image datasets representing diverse cancer types.