Abstract
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.
Citation
ID:
281820
Ref Key:
gunduz-demir2024leveraging