Efficient Multi-Organ Multi-Center Cell Nuclei Segmentation Method Based on Deep Learnable Aggregation Network

Abstract

Automated cell nuclei delineation in whole-slide imaging (WSI) is a fundamental step for many tasks like cancer cell recognition, cancer grading, and cancer subtype classification. Although numerous computational methods have been proposed for segmenting nuclei in WSI images based on image processing and deep learning, existing approaches face major challenges such as color variation due to the use of different stains, the various structures of cell nuclei, and the overlapping and clumped cell nuclei. To circumvent these challenges in this article, we propose an efficient and accurate cell nuclei segmentation method based on deep learning, in which a set of accurate individual cell nuclei segmentation models are developed to predict rough segmentation masks, and then a learnable aggregation network (LANet) is used to predict the final nuclei masks. Besides, we develop cell nuclei segmentation software (with a graphical user interface—GUI) that includes the proposed method and other deep-learning-based cell nuclei segmentation methods. A challenging WSI dataset collected from different centers and organs is used to demonstrate the efficiency of our method. The experimental results reveal that our method obtains a competitive performance compared to the existing approaches in terms of the aggregated Jaccard index (AJI=89.25%) and F1-score (F1=73.02%). The developed nuclei segmentation software can be downloaded from https://github.com/loaysh2010/Cell-Nuclei-Segmentation-GUI-Application.