Colon tissue image segmentation with MWSI-NET.

Journal: Medical & biological engineering & computing
Published Date:

Abstract

Developments in deep learning have resulted in computer-aided diagnosis for many types of cancer. Previously, pathologists manually performed the labeling work in the analysis of colon tissues, which is both time-consuming and labor-intensive. Results are easily affected by subjective conditions. Therefore, it is beneficial to identify the cancerous regions of colon cancer with the assistance of computer-aided technology. Pathological images are often difficult to process due to their irregularity, similarity between cancerous and non-cancerous tissues and large size. We propose a multi-scale perceptual field fusion structure based on a dilated convolutional network. Using this model, a structure of dilated convolution kernels with different aspect ratios is inserted, which can process cancerous regions of different sizes and generate larger receptive fields. Thus, the model can fuse detailed information at different scales for better semantic segmentation. Two different attention mechanisms are adopted to highlight the cancerous areas. A large, open-source dataset was used to verify improved efficacy when compared to previously disclosed methods.

Authors

  • Hao Cheng
    Department of Forensic Pathology, School of Forensic Medicine, China Medical University, Shenyang 110122, China.
  • Kaijie Wu
    Department of Automation, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China. kaijiewu@sjtu.edu.cn.
  • Jie Tian
    CAS Key Laboratory of Molecular Imaging, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China.
  • Kai Ma
    Tencent Jarvis Lab, Shenzhen, 518057, China.
  • Chaocheng Gu
    Department of Automation, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China.
  • Xinping Guan
    Department of Automation, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China. Electronic address: xpguan@sjtu.edu.cn.