PurposeSemantic segmentation in high-resolution, histopathology whole slide images (WSIs) is an important fundamental task in various pathology applications. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are the state-of-the-art approach for image segmentation. A patch-based CNN approach is often employed because of the large size of WSIs; however, segmentation performance is sensitive to the field-of-view and resolution of the input patches, and balancing the trade-offs is challenging when there are drastic size variations in the segmented structures. We propose a multiresolution semantic segmentation approach, which is capable of addressing the threefold trade-off between field-of-view, computational efficiency, and spatial resolution in histopathology WSIs.ApproachWe propose a two-stage multiresolution approach for semantic segmentation of histopathology WSIs of mouse lung tissue and human placenta. In the first stage, we use four different CNNs to extract the contextual information from input patches at four different resolutions. In the second stage, we use another CNN to aggregate the extracted information in the first stage and generate the final segmentation masks.ResultsThe proposed method reported 95.6%, 92.5%, and 97.1% in our single-class placenta dataset and 97.1%, 87.3%, and 83.3% in our multiclass lung dataset for pixel-wise accuracy, mean Dice similarity coefficient, and mean positive predictive value, respectively.ConclusionsThe proposed multiresolution approach demonstrated high accuracy and consistency in the semantic segmentation of biological structures of different sizes in our single-class placenta and multiclass lung histopathology WSI datasets. Our study can potentially be used in automated analysis of biological structures, facilitating the clinical research in histopathology applications.
Purpose: The mean linear intercept (MLI) score is a common metric for quantification of injury in lung histopathology images. The automated estimation of the MLI score is a challenging task because it requires accurate segmentation of different biological components of the lung tissue. Therefore, the most widely used approaches for MLI quantification are based on manual/semi-automated assessment of lung histopathology images, which can be expensive and time-consuming. We describe a fully automated pipeline for MLI estimation, which is capable of producing results comparable to human raters.
Approach: We use a convolutional neural network based on U-Net architecture to segment the diagnostically relevant tissue segments in the whole slide images (WSI) of the mouse lung tissue. The proposed method extracts multiple field-of-view (FOV) images from the tissue segments and screen the FOV images, rejecting images based on presence of certain biological structures (i.e., blood vessels and bronchi). We used color slicing and region growing for segmentation of different biological structures in each FOV image.
Results: The proposed method was tested on ten WSIs from mice and compared against the scores provided by three human raters. In segmenting the relevant tissue segments, our method obtained a mean accuracy, Dice coefficient, and Hausdorff distance of 98.34%, 98.22%, and 109.68 μm, respectively. Our proposed method yields a mean precision, recall, and F1-score of 93.37%, 83.47%, and 87.87%, respectively, in screening of FOV images. There was substantial agreement found between the proposed method and the manual scores (Fleiss Kappa score of 0.76). The mean difference between the calculated MLI score between the automated method and average rater’s score was 2.33 ± 4.13 (4.25 % ± 5.67 % ).
Conclusion: The proposed pipeline for automated calculation of the MLI score demonstrates high consistency and accuracy with human raters and can be a potential replacement for manual/semi-automated approaches in the field.
Hirschsprung’s disease is a motility disorder that requires the assessment of the Auerbach’s (myenteric) plexus located in muscularis propria layer. In this paper, we describe a fully automated method for segmenting muscularis propria (MP) from histopathology images of intestinal specimens using a method based on convolutional neural network (CNN). Such a network has the potential to learn intensity, textural, and shape features from the manual segmented images to accomplish distinction between MP and non-MP tissues from histopathology images. We used a dataset consisted of 15 images and trained our model using approximately 3,400,000 image patches extracted from six images. The trained CNN was employed to determine the boundary of MP on 9 test images (including 75,000,000 image patches). The resultant segmentation maps were compared with the manual segmentations to investigate the performance of our proposed method for MP delineation. Our technique yielded an average Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and absolute surface difference (ASD) of 92.36 ± 2.91% and 1.78 ± 1.57 mm2 respectively, demonstrating that the proposed CNNbased method is capable of accurately segmenting MP tissue from histopathology images.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.