Automatic Tumor Cellularity Measurement: AI-Based Pipeline for Multi-Organ Pathology Imaging

Tumor Cellularity (TC) is an important metric for assessing organ tumor burden. However, manual cell counting is not feasible due to large volumes of pathology images and inconsistent measurements between pathologists. The PAIP 2023 Challenge aimed to solve this problem using AI. The challenge presented two main obstacles: the need to evaluate pancreas-trained data for effective use in the colon, and the common miscounting of clustered cells in segmentation results. To address these, we proposed a novel pipeline. It included channel normalization, which standardizes RGB values to ensure consistent model performance across different organs. By introducing CacoX, a specialized model for accurate cell segmentation, we used Coordinate Attention Gates for accurate cell localization and non-local learning. Finally, the implementation of a watershed algorithm allowed the automatic separation of clustered cells. This approach secured 3rd place in the PAIP 2023 Challenge with an impressive ICC score of 95.69%.