SAHIS-Net: a spectral attention and feature enhancement network for microscopic hyperspectral cholangiocarcinoma image segmentation

Abstract

Cholangiocarcinoma (CCA) poses a significant clinical challenge due to its aggressive nature and poor prognosis. While traditional diagnosis relies on color-based histopathology, hyperspectral imaging (HSI) offers rich, high-dimensional data holding potential for more accurate diagnosis. However, extracting meaningful insights from this data remains challenging. This work investigates the application of deep learning for CCA segmentation in microscopic HSI images, and introduces two novel neural networks: (1) Histogram Matching U-Net (HM-UNet) for efficient image pre-processing, and (2) Spectral Attention based Hyperspectral Image Segmentation Net (SAHIS-Net) for CCA segmentation. SAHIS-Net integrates a novel Spectral Attention (SA) module for adaptively weighing spectral information, an improved attention-aware feature enhancement (AFE) mechanism for better providing the model with more discriminative features, and a multi-loss training strategy for effective early stage feature extraction. We compare SAHIS-Net against several general and CCA-specific models, demonstrating its superior performance in segmenting CCA regions. These results highlight the potential of our approach for segmenting medical HSI images.