Deep information-guided feature refinement network for colorectal gland segmentation

Reliable quantification of colorectal histopathological images is based on the precise segmentation of glands but precise segmentation of glands is challenging as glandular morphology varies widely across histological grades, such as malignant glands and non-gland tissues are too similar to be identified, and tightly connected glands are even highly possibly to be incorrectly segmented as one gland.

A deep information-guided feature refinement network is proposed to improve gland segmentation. Specifically, the backbone deepens the network structure to obtain effective features while maximizing the retained information, and a Multi-Scale Fusion module is proposed to increase the receptive field. In addition, to segment dense glands individually, a Multi-Scale Edge-Refined module is designed to strengthen the boundaries of glands.

The comparative experiments on the eight recently proposed deep learning methods demonstrated that our proposed network has better overall performance and is more competitive on Test B. The F1 score of Test A and Test B is 0.917 and 0.876, respectively; the object-level Dice is 0.921 and 0.884; and the object-level Hausdorff is 43.428 and 87.132, respectively.

The proposed colorectal gland segmentation network can effectively extract features with high representational ability and enhance edge features while retaining details to the maximum, dramatically improving the segmentation performance on malignant glands, and better segmentation results of multi-scale and closed glands can also be obtained.