论文标题
在组织病理学图像中使用部分点注释的弱监督的深核分割
Weakly Supervised Deep Nuclei Segmentation Using Partial Points Annotation in Histopathology Images
论文作者
论文摘要
细胞核分割是组织病理学图像分析中的一项基本任务。通常,这种细分任务需要大量精力来手动生成准确的像素注释,以进行全面监督的培训。为了减轻这种乏味和手动的努力,在本文中,我们提出了一个基于部分点注释的新型弱监督分割框架,即仅标记每个图像中的一小部分核位置。该框架由两个学习阶段组成。在第一阶段,我们设计了一种半监督的策略,以从部分标记的核位置学习检测模型。具体而言,扩展的高斯面罩旨在训练具有部分标记数据的初始模型。然后,提出了具有背景传播的自我训练,以利用未标记的区域来增强核检测并抑制假阳性。在第二阶段,以弱监督的方式从检测到的核位置训练了分割模型。带有互补信息的两种类型的粗标签是从检测点得出的,然后被用于训练深层神经网络。完全连接的条件随机场损失用于训练中,以进一步完善模型,而无需在推理过程中引入额外的计算复杂性。该方法在两个核分割数据集上进行了广泛的评估。实验结果表明,与完全有监督的对应物和最新方法相比,我们的方法可以实现竞争性能,同时需要较少的注释工作。
Nuclei segmentation is a fundamental task in histopathology image analysis. Typically, such segmentation tasks require significant effort to manually generate accurate pixel-wise annotations for fully supervised training. To alleviate such tedious and manual effort, in this paper we propose a novel weakly supervised segmentation framework based on partial points annotation, i.e., only a small portion of nuclei locations in each image are labeled. The framework consists of two learning stages. In the first stage, we design a semi-supervised strategy to learn a detection model from partially labeled nuclei locations. Specifically, an extended Gaussian mask is designed to train an initial model with partially labeled data. Then, selftraining with background propagation is proposed to make use of the unlabeled regions to boost nuclei detection and suppress false positives. In the second stage, a segmentation model is trained from the detected nuclei locations in a weakly-supervised fashion. Two types of coarse labels with complementary information are derived from the detected points and are then utilized to train a deep neural network. The fully-connected conditional random field loss is utilized in training to further refine the model without introducing extra computational complexity during inference. The proposed method is extensively evaluated on two nuclei segmentation datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can achieve competitive performance compared to the fully supervised counterpart and the state-of-the-art methods while requiring significantly less annotation effort.