Using Sparse Patch Annotation for Tumor Segmentation in Histopathological Images

Tumor segmentation is a fundamental task in histopathological image analysis. Creating accurate pixel-wise annotations for such segmentation tasks in a fully-supervised training framework requires significant effort. To reduce the burden of manual annotation, we propose a novel weakly supervised seg...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Switzerland), 2022-08, Vol.22 (16), p.6053
Main Authors:	Liu, Yiqing, He, Qiming, Duan, Hufei, Shi, Huijuan, Han, Anjia, He, Yonghong
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	Algorithms Annotations Classification Deep learning histology images Image analysis Image classification Labeling Medical imaging equipment Pathology Pixels semi-supervised learning sparse annotation tumor segmentation Tumors weakly-supervised learning
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Summary:	Tumor segmentation is a fundamental task in histopathological image analysis. Creating accurate pixel-wise annotations for such segmentation tasks in a fully-supervised training framework requires significant effort. To reduce the burden of manual annotation, we propose a novel weakly supervised segmentation framework based on sparse patch annotation, i.e., only small portions of patches in an image are labeled as ‘tumor’ or ‘normal’. The framework consists of a patch-wise segmentation model called PSeger, and an innovative semi-supervised algorithm. PSeger has two branches for patch classification and image classification, respectively. This two-branch structure enables the model to learn more general features and thus reduce the risk of overfitting when learning sparsely annotated data. We incorporate the idea of consistency learning and self-training into the semi-supervised training strategy to take advantage of the unlabeled images. Trained on the BCSS dataset with only 25% of the images labeled (five patches for each labeled image), our proposed method achieved competitive performance compared to the fully supervised pixel-wise segmentation models. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed solution has the potential to reduce the burden of labeling histopathological images.
ISSN:	1424-8220 1424-8220