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Few-Shot Learning for Annotation-Efficient Nucleus Instance Segmentation

delete2025-08-01
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OA
AI
于明 cover
于明 (Ming Yu)
Z
Zihao Wu
杨
杨洁 (Jie Yang)
李丹怡 cover
李丹怡 (Danyi Li)
Y
Yuan Gao
C
Changxin Gao
G
Gui-Song Xia
Y
Yuanqing Li
梁
梁莉 (Liang Li)
余晋刚 cover
余晋刚 (Jin-Gang Yu)
DOI:10.1109/TMI.2025.3564458delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Nucleus instance segmentation from histopathology images suffers from the extremely laborious and expert-dependent annotation of nucleus instances. As a promising solution to this task, annotation-efficient deep learning paradigms have recently attracted much research interest, such as weakly-/semi-supervised learning, generative adversarial learning, etc. In this paper, we propose to formulate annotation-efficient nucleus instance segmentation from the perspective of few-shot learning (FSL). Our work was motivated by that, with the prosperity of computational pathology, an increasing number of fully-annotated datasets are publicly accessible, and we hope to leverage these external datasets to assist nucleus instance segmentation on the target dataset which only has very limited annotation. To achieve this goal, we adopt the meta-learning based FSL paradigm, which however has to be tailored in two substantial aspects before adapting to our task. First, since the novel classes may be inconsistent with those of the external dataset, we extend the basic definition of few-shot instance segmentation (FSIS) to generalized few-shot instance segmentation (GFSIS). Second, to cope with the intrinsic challenges of nucleus segmentation, including touching between adjacent cells, cellular heterogeneity, etc., we further introduce a structural guidance mechanism into the GFSIS network, finally leading to a unified Structurally-Guided Generalized Few-Shot Instance Segmentation (SGFSIS) framework. Extensive experiments on a couple of publicly accessible datasets demonstrate that, SGFSIS can outperform other annotation-efficient learning baselines, including semi-supervised learning, simple transfer learning, etc., with comparable performance to fully supervised learning with around 10% annotations.
Keywords:
Computational pathology
nucleus instance segmentation
few-shot learning
annotation-efficient learning

Journal

IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging cover
IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging
IF:
9.8
Papers:
6.3K
Citations:
3.7W

Organization

S
southern medical university
Scholars:
1.3W
Papers: 3.3K
Citations: 5
H
huazhong university of science and technology
Scholars:
2.7W
Papers: 8.1K
Citations: 5
W
wuhan university
Scholars:
8.1W
Papers: 5.8W
Citations: 70
S
south china university of technology
Scholars:
6.8W
Papers: 5.1W
Citations: 85
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Cited Papers

Cited Papers

Histopathological Image Analysis: A Review
err2009-01-01
err0
errOAAI
errM.N. Gurcan; L.E. Boucheron; A. Can; A. Madabhushi; N.M. Rajpoot; B. Yener
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U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation
err2015-11-18
err0
PREAI
errOlaf Ronneberger; Philipp Fischer; Thomas Brox
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Meta multi-task nuclei segmentation with fewer training samples
err2022-08-01
err15
PREAI
errHan, Chu; Yao, Huasheng; Zhao, Bingchao; Li, Zhenhui; Shi, Zhenwei; Wu, Lei; Chen, Xin; Qu, Jinrong; Zhao, Ke; Lan, Rushi; Liang, Changhong; Pan, Xipeng; Liu, Zaiyi
errShare
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Quantitative Image Analysis of Cellular Heterogeneity in Breast Tumors Complements Genomic Profiling
err2012-10-24
err330
PREAI
errYuan, Yinyin; Failmezger, Henrik; Rueda, Oscar M.; Ali, H. Raza; Graef, Stefan; Chin, Suet-Feung; Schwarz, Roland F.; Curtis, Christina; Dunning, Mark J.; Bardwell, Helen; Johnson, Nicola; Doyle, Sarah; Turashvili, Gulisa; Provenzano, Elena; Aparicio, Sam; Caldas, Carlos; Markowetz, Florian
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