A Deep Learning Framework for Gastric Cancer Cell Segmentation with Multi-Scale Attention Mechanisms

The accurate segmentation of gastric cancer cells is important in pathology for diagnosing and detecting diseases early. However, current approaches still suffer from limitations such as expensive annotation, fuzzy lesion boundaries, and weak feature expression. In order to solve these problems, we present MSAF-Net, a novel U-Net framework optimized both architecturally and in terms of the loss function. In particular, we incorporate a Multi-scale Dilated Pooling Fusion Block into the encoder stage to achieve enhanced interaction of multi-paths and thus improve features' diversity and boundary sensitivity. We also introduce a Dual-Channel Attention Block in place of traditional convolution block in the decoder stage to restore better details and reconstruct the fuzzy boundaries. Meanwhile, a Diagonal Mahalanobis Consistency Loss is incorporated into our framework to facilitate class compactness. Experiments performed on the SEED-Gastric Carcinoma Stage 1 dataset show that the designed algorithm can reach 0.776 in Dice score and 0.821 in Accuracy, which outperforms the baseline method U-Net. It is clear that these results have shown the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed approach. The introduced algorithm allows for more precise quantification of gastric cancer cell morphology.