Title
Learning Whole-Slide Segmentation from Inexact and Incomplete Labels Using Tissue Graphs
Abstract
Segmenting histology images into diagnostically relevant regions is imperative to support timely and reliable decisions by pathologists. To this end, computer-aided techniques have been proposed to delineate relevant regions in scanned histology slides. However, the techniques necessitate task-specific large datasets of annotated pixels, which is tedious, time-consuming, expensive, and infeasible to acquire for many histology tasks. Thus, weakly-supervised semantic segmentation techniques are proposed to leverage weak supervision which is cheaper and quicker to acquire. In this paper, we propose SegGini, a weakly-supervised segmentation method using graphs, that can utilize weak multiplex annotations, i.e., inexact and incomplete annotations, to segment arbitrary and large images, scaling from tissue microarray (TMA) to whole slide image (WSI). Formally, SegGini constructs a tissue-graph representation for an input image, where the graph nodes depict tissue regions. Then, it performs weakly-supervised segmentation via node classification by using inexact image-level labels, incomplete scribbles, or both. We evaluated SegGini on two public prostate cancer datasets containing TMAs and WSIs. Our method achieved state-of-the-art segmentation performance on both datasets for various annotation settings while being comparable to a pathologist baseline. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/histocartography/seg-gini.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1007/978-3-030-87196-3_59
MEDICAL IMAGE COMPUTING AND COMPUTER ASSISTED INTERVENTION - MICCAI 2021, PT II
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Weakly-supervised semantic segmentation, Scalable digital pathology, Multiplex annotations, Graphs in digital pathology
Conference
12902
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0302-9743
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
9