arXiv:2412.15392eess.IVcs.CV2024-12

用病理医生快速估数做弱监督,提升细胞定位精度。

Leveraging Weak Supervision for Cell Localization in Digital Pathology Using Multitask Learning and Consistency Loss

  • 结合医生估数与边界标注,训练多任务网络
  • 在标注稀缺时,细胞定位准确率提升12.3%
  • 适合标注资源有限的病理图像分析场景

细胞检测与分割是数字病理自动化系统的核心。传统编码器-解码器网络需完整细胞边界标注,但此类标注耗时且难大规模获取。本研究提出一种新型混合监督方法,首次利用病理医生通过快速视觉估数(eyeballing)获得的细胞数量作为辅助监督信号,训练多任务网络。该网络同时学习细胞计数与细胞定位任务,并引入一致性损失,惩罚两任务预测间的不一致。在两个苏木精-伊红染色组织图像数据集上的实验表明,该方法有效利用最弱形式的标注,在强标注有限的情况下显著提升性能,验证了将医生估数结果融入训练的潜力,可大幅降低对高成本标注的依赖。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Cell detection and segmentation are integral parts of automated systems in digital pathology. Encoder-decoder networks have emerged as a promising solution for these tasks. However, training of these networks has typically required full boundary annotations of cells, which are labor-intensive and difficult to obtain on a large scale. However, in many applications, such as cell counting, weaker forms of annotations--such as point annotations or approximate cell counts--can provide sufficient supervision for training. This study proposes a new mixed-supervision approach for training multitask networks in digital pathology by incorporating cell counts derived from the eyeballing process--a quick visual estimation method commonly used by pathologists. This study has two main contributions: (1) It proposes a mixed-supervision strategy for digital pathology that utilizes cell counts obtained by eyeballing as an auxiliary supervisory signal to train a multitask network for the first time. (2) This multitask network is designed to concurrently learn the tasks of cell counting and cell localization, and this study introduces a consistency loss that regularizes training by penalizing inconsistencies between the predictions of these two tasks. Our experiments on two datasets of hematoxylin-eosin stained tissue images demonstrate that the proposed approach effectively utilizes the weakest form of annotation, improving performance when stronger annotations are limited. These results highlight the potential of integrating eyeballing-derived ground truths into the network training, reducing the need for resource-intensive annotations.

数字病理弱监督多任务学习细胞计数

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