Cancer Sensitive Cascaded Networks (CSC-Net) for Efficient Histopathology Whole Slide Image Segmentation

Automatic segmentation of histopathological whole slide images (WSIs) is challenging due to the high resolution and large scale. In this paper, we proposed a cascade strategy for fast segmentation of WSIs based on convolutional neural networks. Our segmentation framework consists of two U-Net structures which are trained with samples from different magnifications. Meanwhile, we designed a novel cancer sensitive loss (CSL), which is effective in improving the sensitivity of cancer segmentation of the first network and reducing the false positive rate of the second network. We conducted experiments on ACDC-LungHP dataset and compared our method with 2 state-of-the-art segmentation methods improved from U-Net. The experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed method can improve the segmentation accuracy and meanwhile reduce the amount of computation. The dice score coefficient and precision of lung cancer segmentation are 0.694 and 0.947, respectively, which are superior to the compared methods.