Continuous Refinement-based Digital Pathology Image Assistance Scheme in Medical Decision-Making Systems.

Abstract

Digital pathology images' extensive cellular information provide a trustworthy foundation for tumor diagnosis. With the aid of computer-aided diagnostics, pathologists can locate crucial information more quickly. The cascade structure refines the segmentation results by utilizing its multi-task and multi-stage characteristics. However, cascade-based models require downsampling and cropping of patches during the inference process due to the ultra-high resolution and complex structure of pathology images. This not only increases the cost and computation time but also results in the loss of cellular details and corrupts the global contextual information. This study proposes a Digital Pathology Image Assistance Program (CRSDPI) for medical decision-making systems that is based on continuous improvement. After locating the region of interest using the maximum inter-class variance method, the pictures are preprocessed to account for the impacts of staining inconsistencies and sensitivity variations on the model's performance. Ultimately, we create a two-phase continuously refined segmentation network (TCRNet) by combining an enhanced continuous refinement model with a coarse segmentation network built on a pyramid scene parsing network. The coarse segmentation network introduces an auxiliary loss term to speed up convergence, and the refined model introduces an implicit function to reduce computational cost and reconstruct more details. The TCRNet model refines the target by successively aligning the features without the need to take cascading decoder operations after encoder. Experiments conducted on digital pathology images of breast cancer and osteosarcoma demonstrate the superior prediction accuracy and computational speed of our strategy.