Dual supervised sampling networks for real-time segmentation of cervical cell nucleus

The morphology of the cervical cell nucleus is the most important consideration for pathological cell identification. And a precise segmentation of the cervical cell nucleus determines the performance of the final classification for most traditional algorithms and even some deep learning-based algorithms. Many deep learning-based methods can accurately segment cervical cell nuclei but will cost lots of time, especially when dealing with the whole-slide image (WSI) of tens of thousands of cells. To address this challenge, we propose a dual-supervised sampling network structure, in which a supervised-down sampling module uses compressed images instead of original images for cell nucleus segmentation, and a boundary detection network is introduced to supervise the up-sampling process of the decoding layer for accurate segmentation. This strategy dramatically reduces the convolution calculation in image feature extraction and ensures segmentation accuracy. Experimental results on various cervical cell datasets demonstrate that compared with UNet, the inference speed of the proposed network is increased by 5 times without losing segmentation accuracy. The codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/ldrunning/DSSNet.