解决密集重叠细胞分割难题,用拓扑感知协同着色方法提升精度。
Disco: Densely-overlapping Cell Instance Segmentation via Adjacency-aware Collaborative Coloring
- 基于拓扑分解与约束深度学习,实现邻接关系感知的协同着色。
- 发现真实细胞图多为非二分图,三角形环占比高,2色法不适用。
- 适用于复杂病理图像中的密集细胞实例分割,尤其适合高重叠场景。
精准的细胞实例分割是数字病理分析的基础。现有基于轮廓检测和距离映射的方法在处理复杂密集细胞区域时仍面临显著挑战。基于图着色的方法为此任务提供了新范式,但其在真实世界中密集重叠与复杂拓扑场景下的有效性尚未验证。为此,我们发布了一个大规模数据集 GBC-FS 2025,包含高度复杂且密集的亚细胞核排列。我们首次对四个多样化数据集中的细胞邻接图染色特性进行了系统分析,发现一个关键现象:大多数真实细胞图是非二分图,奇数长度环(主要为三角形)占比极高。这表明简单2色理论不足以应对复杂组织,而高色度模型则会导致表示冗余与优化困难。基于此对真实场景复杂性的认知,我们提出 Disco(Densely-overlapping Cell Instance Segmentation via Adjacency-aware COllaborative Coloring),一种基于‘分而治之’原则的邻接感知框架。它创新性地结合数据驱动的拓扑标记策略与受限深度学习系统,以解决复杂邻接冲突。首先,“显式标记”策略通过递归分解细胞图并隔离‘冲突集’,将拓扑挑战转化为可学习的分类任务;其次,“隐式消歧”机制通过强制不同实例间特征差异性,在冲突区域消除歧义,使模型能够学习可分离的特征表示。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Accurate cell instance segmentation is foundational for digital pathology analysis. Existing methods based on contour detection and distance mapping still face significant challenges in processing complex and dense cellular regions. Graph coloring-based methods provide a new paradigm for this task, yet the effectiveness of this paradigm in real-world scenarios with dense overlaps and complex topologies has not been verified. Addressing this issue, we release a large-scale dataset GBC-FS 2025, which contains highly complex and dense sub-cellular nuclear arrangements. We conduct the first systematic analysis of the chromatic properties of cell adjacency graphs across four diverse datasets and reveal an important discovery: most real-world cell graphs are non-bipartite, with a high prevalence of odd-length cycles (predominantly triangles). This makes simple 2-coloring theory insufficient for handling complex tissues, while higher-chromaticity models would cause representational redundancy and optimization difficulties. Building on this observation of complex real-world contexts, we propose Disco (Densely-overlapping Cell Instance Segmentation via Adjacency-aware COllaborative Coloring), an adjacency-aware framework based on the "divide and conquer" principle. It uniquely combines a data-driven topological labeling strategy with a constrained deep learning system to resolve complex adjacency conflicts. First, "Explicit Marking" strategy transforms the topological challenge into a learnable classification task by recursively decomposing the cell graph and isolating a "conflict set." Second, "Implicit Disambiguation" mechanism resolves ambiguities in conflict regions by enforcing feature dissimilarity between different instances, enabling the model to learn separable feature representations.
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