Segmentation Of Cervical Nuclei Research Articles

Segmentation of cervical nuclei using convolutional neural network for conventional cytology

ABSTRACT Although implementing the Pap smear has drastically reduced the mortality rates from cervical cancer, false positives and negatives are related to the quality of the analysis and the cytopathologist experience. An alternative is the insertion of digital cytology in the quality monitoring to assist the screening. However, conventional cytology is still a major challenge, as it presents a lot of cellular overlap and several epithelial structures that make it difficult to implement computational methodologies. This article compares the performance of U-net and SegNet neural networks for nuclei segmentation in cervical images. Experiments were performed with different activation functions, batch sizes, and datasets, ISBI (synthetic images from liquid cytology) and CRIC Cervix-Seg (conventional cytology real images). The models achieved a Dice coefficient of 0.9783 for ISBI2015 and 0.9429 for CRIC Cervix-Seg. These results suggest a methodology capable of segmenting real images of cervical nuclei with quality, even in situations of overlap and artefacts, advancing efforts towards the automation of tasks as part of the cytopathological analysis in the laboratory work routine.

GCP-Net: A Gating Context-Aware Pooling Network for Cervical Cell Nuclei Segmentation

Accurate segmentation of cervical nuclei is an essential step in the early diagnosis of cervical cancer. Still, there are few studies on the segmentation of clustered nuclei in clusters of cells. Because of the complexities of high cell overlap, blurred nuclei boundaries, and clustered cells, the accurate segmentation of clustered nuclei remains a pressing challenge. In this paper, we purposefully propose a GCP-Net deep learning network to handle the challenging cervical cluster cell images. The proposed U-Net-based GCP-Net consists of a pretrained ResNet-34 model as encoder, a Gating Context-aware Pooling (GCP) module, and a modified decoder. The GCP module is the primary building block of the network to improve the quality of feature learning. It allows the GCP-Net to refine details of feature maps leveraging multiscale context gating and Global Context Attention for the spatial and texture dependencies. The decoder block including Global Context Attention- (GCA-) Residual Block helps build long-range dependencies and global context interaction in the decoder to refine the predicted masks. We conducted extensive comparative experiments with seven existing models on our ClusteredCell dataset and three typical medical image datasets, respectively. The experimental results showed that the GCP-Net obtained promising results on three evaluation metrics AJI, Dice, and PQ, demonstrating the superiorities and generalizability of our GCP-Net for automatic medical image segmentation in comparison with some SOAT baselines.

Automatic Segmentation of Cervical Nuclei Based on Deep Learning and a Conditional Random Field

Automatic and accurate cervical nucleus segmentation is important because nuclei carry substantial diagnostic information for automatic computer-assisted cervical cancer screening and diagnosis systems. In this paper, we propose a cervical nucleus segmentation method in which pixel-level prior information is utilized to provide the supervisory information for the training of a mask regional convolutional neural network (Mask-RCNN), which is then employed to extract the multi-scale features of the nuclei, and the coarse segmentation and bounding box of the nuclei are obtained by forward propagation of the Mask-RCNN. To refine the segmentation, a local fully connected conditional random field (LFCCRF) that contains unary and pairwise energy terms is employed. The nuclear region of interest is determined by extending the bounding box, the coarse segmentation in the nuclear region is used to construct the unary energy, and the pairwise energy is contributed by the position and intensity information of all of the pixels in the nuclear region. By minimizing the energy of the LFCCRF, the final segmentation is realized. We evaluated our method by using cervical nuclei from the Herlev Pap smear data set in this paper, and the precision, recall, and Zijdenbos similarity index were all found to be greater than 0.95 with low standard deviations, demonstrating that our method enables more accurate and stable cervical nucleus segmentation than the current state-of-the-art methods.