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Mahbod A, Dorffner G, Ellinger I, Woitek R, Hatamikia S. Improving generalization capability of deep learning-based nuclei instance segmentation by non-deterministic train time and deterministic test time stain normalization. Comput Struct Biotechnol J 2024; 23:669-678. [PMID: 38292472 PMCID: PMC10825317 DOI: 10.1016/j.csbj.2023.12.042] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/12/2023] [Revised: 12/26/2023] [Accepted: 12/26/2023] [Indexed: 02/01/2024] Open
Abstract
With the advent of digital pathology and microscopic systems that can scan and save whole slide histological images automatically, there is a growing trend to use computerized methods to analyze acquired images. Among different histopathological image analysis tasks, nuclei instance segmentation plays a fundamental role in a wide range of clinical and research applications. While many semi- and fully-automatic computerized methods have been proposed for nuclei instance segmentation, deep learning (DL)-based approaches have been shown to deliver the best performances. However, the performance of such approaches usually degrades when tested on unseen datasets. In this work, we propose a novel method to improve the generalization capability of a DL-based automatic segmentation approach. Besides utilizing one of the state-of-the-art DL-based models as a baseline, our method incorporates non-deterministic train time and deterministic test time stain normalization, and ensembling to boost the segmentation performance. We trained the model with one single training set and evaluated its segmentation performance on seven test datasets. Our results show that the proposed method provides up to 4.9%, 5.4%, and 5.9% better average performance in segmenting nuclei based on Dice score, aggregated Jaccard index, and panoptic quality score, respectively, compared to the baseline segmentation model.
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Affiliation(s)
- Amirreza Mahbod
- Research Center for Medical Image Analysis and Artificial Intelligence, Department of Medicine, Danube Private University, Krems an der Donau, Austria
| | - Georg Dorffner
- Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
| | - Isabella Ellinger
- Institute for Pathophysiology and Allergy Research, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
| | - Ramona Woitek
- Research Center for Medical Image Analysis and Artificial Intelligence, Department of Medicine, Danube Private University, Krems an der Donau, Austria
| | - Sepideh Hatamikia
- Research Center for Medical Image Analysis and Artificial Intelligence, Department of Medicine, Danube Private University, Krems an der Donau, Austria
- Austrian Center for Medical Innovation and Technology, Wiener Neustadt, Austria
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Mahbod A, Polak C, Feldmann K, Khan R, Gelles K, Dorffner G, Woitek R, Hatamikia S, Ellinger I. NuInsSeg: A fully annotated dataset for nuclei instance segmentation in H&E-stained histological images. Sci Data 2024; 11:295. [PMID: 38486039 PMCID: PMC10940572 DOI: 10.1038/s41597-024-03117-2] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/10/2023] [Accepted: 03/04/2024] [Indexed: 03/18/2024] Open
Abstract
In computational pathology, automatic nuclei instance segmentation plays an essential role in whole slide image analysis. While many computerized approaches have been proposed for this task, supervised deep learning (DL) methods have shown superior segmentation performances compared to classical machine learning and image processing techniques. However, these models need fully annotated datasets for training which is challenging to acquire, especially in the medical domain. In this work, we release one of the biggest fully manually annotated datasets of nuclei in Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E)-stained histological images, called NuInsSeg. This dataset contains 665 image patches with more than 30,000 manually segmented nuclei from 31 human and mouse organs. Moreover, for the first time, we provide additional ambiguous area masks for the entire dataset. These vague areas represent the parts of the images where precise and deterministic manual annotations are impossible, even for human experts. The dataset and detailed step-by-step instructions to generate related segmentation masks are publicly available on the respective repositories.
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Affiliation(s)
- Amirreza Mahbod
- Research Center for Medical Image Analysis and Artificial Intelligence, Department of Medicine, Danube Private University, Krems an der Donau, 3500, Austria.
- Institute for Pathophysiology and Allergy Research, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, 1090, Austria.
| | - Christine Polak
- Institute for Pathophysiology and Allergy Research, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, 1090, Austria
| | - Katharina Feldmann
- Institute for Pathophysiology and Allergy Research, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, 1090, Austria
| | - Rumsha Khan
- Institute for Pathophysiology and Allergy Research, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, 1090, Austria
| | - Katharina Gelles
- Institute for Pathophysiology and Allergy Research, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, 1090, Austria
| | - Georg Dorffner
- Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, 1090, Austria
| | - Ramona Woitek
- Research Center for Medical Image Analysis and Artificial Intelligence, Department of Medicine, Danube Private University, Krems an der Donau, 3500, Austria
| | - Sepideh Hatamikia
- Research Center for Medical Image Analysis and Artificial Intelligence, Department of Medicine, Danube Private University, Krems an der Donau, 3500, Austria
- Austrian Center for Medical Innovation and Technology, Wiener Neustadt, 2700, Austria
| | - Isabella Ellinger
- Institute for Pathophysiology and Allergy Research, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, 1090, Austria
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Wang J, Qin L, Chen D, Wang J, Han BW, Zhu Z, Qiao G. An improved Hover-net for nuclear segmentation and classification in histopathology images. Neural Comput Appl 2023. [DOI: 10.1007/s00521-023-08394-3] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 03/29/2023]
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