Context-aware learning for cancer cell nucleus recognition in pathology images

Nucleus identification supports many quantitative analysis studies that rely on nuclei positions or categories. Contextual information in pathology images refers to information near the to-be-recognized cell, which can be very helpful for nucleus subtyping. Current CNN-based methods do not explicitly encode contextual information within the input images and point annotations.

In this article, we propose a novel framework with context to locate and classify nuclei in microscopy image data. Specifically, first we use state-of-the-art network architectures to extract multi-scale feature representations from multi-field-of-view, multi-resolution input images and then conduct feature aggregation on-the-fly with stacked convolutional operations. Then, two auxiliary tasks are added to the model to effectively utilize the contextual information. One for predicting the frequencies of nuclei, and the other for extracting the regional distribution information of the same kind of nuclei. The entire framework is trained in an end-to-end, pixel-to-pixel fashion. We evaluate our method on two histopathological image datasets with different tissue and stain preparations, and experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms other recent state-of-the-art models in nucleus identification.

The source code of our method is freely available at https://github.com/qjxjy123/DonRabbit.

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.