Function tissue unit segmentation based on UNext model

Abstract

Accurate segmentation for Functional Tissue Units (FTUs) is a challenging issue in past decades. In this study, a model using the dataset of tissue section images will be built to evaluate and mark FTUs across five human organs as clearly as possible. We have the Human Protein Atlas (HPA) as training data and the data from Human BioMolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP) as testing data. To balance accuracy and inference speed, this study applied Unext, an efficient network based on Unet, as the basic model. We also aim to use some tricks to further improve the performance of the model. First, we used several image enhancement methods to diversify the input image. Second, several structures like Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) and the Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling are added to improve model performance and convergence speed. As a result, we successfully segment functional tissue units among images of different sizes. Our proposed model scored 0.56 out of 1.00 by the judge of the competition.