Nuclei Segmentation via a Deep Panoptic Model with Semantic Feature Fusion

Nuclei Segmentation via a Deep Panoptic Model with Semantic Feature Fusion

Dongnan Liu, Donghao Zhang, Yang Song, Chaoyi Zhang, Fan Zhang, Lauren O'Donnell, Weidong Cai

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 861-868. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/121

Automated detection and segmentation of individual nuclei in histopathology images is important for cancer diagnosis and prognosis. Due to the high variability of nuclei appearances and numerous overlapping objects, this task still remains challenging. Deep learning based semantic and instance segmentation models have been proposed to address the challenges, but these methods tend to concentrate on either the global or local features and hence still suffer from information loss. In this work, we propose a panoptic segmentation model which incorporates an auxiliary semantic segmentation branch with the instance branch to integrate global and local features. Furthermore, we design a feature map fusion mechanism in the instance branch and a new mask generator to prevent information loss. Experimental results on three different histopathology datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art nuclei segmentation methods and popular semantic and instance segmentation models by a large margin.
Keywords:
Computer Vision: Biomedical Image Understanding
Machine Learning Applications: Bio;Medicine
Machine Learning Applications: Applications of Supervised Learning