用空间注意力融合门控提升细胞分割分类精度,尤其改善濒死细胞识别。
SAFViT: Spatial Attention Fusion Gating for Vision Transformer-Based Nucleus Segmentation and Classification

- 设计新型空间注意力融合门控,动态加权编码器与解码器特征
- 在PanNuke数据集上多类别全景质量达0.471,濒死细胞F1提升14.5点
- 适合数字病理中细粒度细胞分析任务,对少数类识别效果显著
准确的细胞分割与分类是数字病理学的基础,支持定量组织分析以辅助诊断与治疗。基于编码器-解码器结构的多尺度特征融合方法已成为主流,但传统直接跳跃连接对所有空间位置一视同仁,导致冗余或冲突信息传至解码器。为此,本文提出在CellViT模型中用新型空间注意力融合(SAF)门控替代常规跳跃连接。每个SAF门将编码器跳跃特征与上采样解码器特征拼接,经两层逐点卷积与中间ReLU压缩,再通过通道级softmax生成每像素的“信任热图”(总和为1),使网络学习各源在不同位置的可信度。该融合特征显著提升对少数类“死亡细胞”的检测能力,在PanNuke数据集上实现0.471的多类别全景质量(mPQ),较无门控基线提升14.5点的死亡细胞F1分数。SAF门控在PanNuke与MoNuSeg数据集上对比六种替代方案(无门控、注意力门、Squeeze-and-Excitation、CBAM、交叉注意力、注意力特征融合),均表现最优。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Accurate cell segmentation and classification are foundational to digital pathology, enabling quantitative tissue analysis for diagnosis and treatment planning. Encoder-decoder architectures that fuse multi-scale features through skip connections have become the dominant paradigm for this task, yet standard direct skip connections treat every spatial location equally, which leads to redundant and potentially conflicting information reaching the decoder. To overcome this problem, various gating mechanisms have been introduced, but most of them operate solely on filtering encoder information, neglecting the benefit of global contextual information from the decoder. This study proposes replacing conventional skip connections in a CellViT-based model with a novel Spatial Attention Fusion (SAF) Gating module. Each SAF gate concatenates the encoder skip and upsampled decoder features, compresses them through two pointwise convolutions with an intermediate ReLU, and applies a channel-wise softmax to produce a per-pixel "heatmap of trust" that sums to unity at every spatial location, allowing the network to learn where each source is most trustworthy. The resulting fused features improve the model's ability to detect the minority "Dead" class, which in turn enhances the multi-class panoptic quality (mPQ) on the PanNuke dataset. SAF Gating is compared against six gating alternatives including no gating, attention gates, squeeze-and-excitation, CBAM, cross-attention, and attentional feature fusion on PanNuke and MoNuSeg datasets. SAF Gating achieves the highest mPQ (0.471), a gain driven primarily by a 14.5-point improvement in Dead-class F1 score compared to ungated CellViT baseline.
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