arrow
Return

Prompting Vision-Language Model for Nuclei Instance Segmentation and Classification

delete2025-06-25
delete0
PRE
AI
J
Jieru Yao
G
Guangyu Guo
Z
Zhaohui Zheng
谢强 (Qiang Xie)
L
Longfei Han
D
Dingwen Zhang
J
Junwei Han
DOI:10.1109/TMI.2025.3579214delete
deleteOriginal
deleteOriginal request for help
deleteShare
deleteSave
Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Nuclei instance segmentation and classification are a fundamental and challenging task in whole slide Imaging (WSI) analysis. Most dense nuclei prediction studies rely heavily on crowd labelled data on high-resolution digital images, leading to a time-consuming and expertise-required paradigm. Recently, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been intensively investigated, which learn rich cross-modal correlation from large-scale image-text pairs without tedious annotations. Inspired by this, we build a novel framework, called PromptNu, aiming at infusing abundant nuclei knowledge into the training of the nuclei instance recognition model through vision-language contrastive learning and prompt engineering techniques. Specifically, our approach starts with the creation of multifaceted prompts that integrate comprehensive nuclear knowledge, including visual insights from the GPT-4V model, statistical analyses, and expert insights from the pathology field. Then, we propose a novel prompting methodology that consists of two pivotal vision-language contrastive learning components: the Prompting Nuclei Representation Learning (PNuRL) and the Prompting Nuclei Dense Prediction (PNuDP), which adeptly integrates the expertise embedded in pre-trained VLMs and multifaceted prompts into the feature extraction and prediction process, respectively. Comprehensive experiments on six datasets with extensive WSI scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for both nuclei instance segmentation and classification tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/NucleiDet/PromptNu
Keywords:
Digital pathology analysis
nuclei instance segmentation
nuclei classification
vision-language model
prompt learning

Journal

IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging cover
IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging
IF:
9.8
Papers:
6.2K
Citations:
3.7W

Organization

B
Beijing Technology and Business University
Scholars:
3.9K
Papers: 1.7K
Citations: 1.6W
F
Fourth Military Medical University
Scholars:
2.3K
Papers: 484
Citations: 0
N
Northwestern Polytechnical University
Scholars:
4.6W
Papers: 3.7W
Citations: 5.3W
U
university of science and technology of china
Scholars:
1.0W
Papers: 3.9K
Citations: 3
researcher View more organizations