EpithNet: Deep Regression for Epithelium Segmentation in Cervical Histology Images

Automated pathology techniques for detecting cervical cancer at the premalignant stage have advantages for women in areas with limited medical resources.

This article presents EpithNet, a deep learning approach for the critical step of automated epithelium segmentation in digitized cervical histology images. EpithNet employs three regression networks of varying dimensions of image input blocks (patches) surrounding a given pixel, with all blocks at a fixed resolution, using varying network depth.

The proposed model was evaluated on 311 digitized histology epithelial images and the results indicate that the technique maximizes region-based information to improve pixel-wise probability estimates. EpithNet-mc model, formed by intermediate concatenation of the convolutional layers of the three models, was observed to achieve 94% Jaccard index (intersection over union) which is 26.4% higher than the benchmark model.

EpithNet yields better epithelial segmentation results than state-of-the-art benchmark methods.