CAS-UNet: A Context-Adaptive Encoder-Decoder Network with Boundary-Distance Auxiliary Supervision for...

Histopathological nuclei segmentation is essential for quantitative pathological analysis but remains challenging due to staining variation, heterogeneous tissue backgrounds, diverse nuclear morphology, ambiguous boundaries, and the limited batch sizes commonly used for high-resolution image training. This study proposes CAS-UNet, a context-adaptive encoder-decoder framework with boundary-distance auxiliary supervision for binary nuclei-region segmentation. The proposed network integrates a Pathology-Adaptive Context Pyramid for adaptive multi-scale contextual aggregation, a Normalized Skip Selection Module for semantic-guided skip-feature filtering, a group-normalized residual decoder for feature reconstruction under small-batch settings, and Boundary-Distance Auxiliary Supervision for structural constraint learning. CAS-UNet was evaluated on five public histopathological nuclei datasets, including CoNIC, CPM17, MoNuSeg, NuInsSeg, and PanNuke. In the main benchmark comparison, CAS-UNet achieved the highest Dice and IoU values among the evaluated segmentation methods across the five datasets. Supplementary controlled experiments with five paired random seeds further demonstrated consistent improvements over U-Net and DeepLabV3+ under identical data partitions and training configurations. Additional experiments showed improved performance compared with traditional image-processing pipelines and more consistent segmentation results with Group Normalization than Batch Normalization under different batch sizes. Multi-seed component ablation experiments further characterized the contributions of PACP, NSSM, GN-based decoding, and BDAS. The proposed CAS-UNet provides an accurate and reliable framework for binary nuclei-region segmentation. Future work will focus on instance separation, stain-robust domain adaptation, independent clinical validation, and whole-slide image evaluation to further explore its potential for downstream pathological analysis.