Background removal for debiasing computer-aided cytological diagnosis

To address the background-bias problem in computer-aided cytology caused by microscopic slide deterioration, this article proposes a deep learning approach for cell segmentation and background removal without requiring cell annotation. A U-Net-based model was trained to separate cells from the background in an unsupervised manner by leveraging the redundancy of the background and the sparsity of cells in liquid-based cytology (LBC) images. The experimental results demonstrate that the U-Net-based model trained on a small set of cytology images can exclude background features and accurately segment cells. This capability is beneficial for debiasing in the detection and classification of the cells of interest in oral LBC. Slide deterioration can significantly affect deep learning-based cell classification. Our proposed method effectively removes background features at no cost of cell annotation, thereby enabling accurate cytological diagnosis through the deep learning of microscopic slide images.