Unsupervised tissue segmentation via deep constrained Gaussian network
File(s)FINAL VERSION.pdf (3.75 MB)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Tissue segmentation is the mainstay of pathological examination, whereas the manual delineation is unduly burdensome. To assist this time-consuming and subjective manual step, researchers have devised methods to automatically segment structures in pathological images. Recently, automated machine and deep learning based methods dominate tissue segmentation research studies. However, most machine and deep learning based approaches are supervised and developed using a large number of training samples, in which the pixel-wise annotations are expensive and sometimes can be impossible to obtain. This paper introduces a novel unsupervised learning paradigm by integrating an end-to-end deep mixture model with a constrained indicator to acquire accurate semantic tissue segmentation. This constraint aims to centralise the components of deep mixture models during the calculation of the optimisation function. In so doing, the redundant or empty class issues, which are common in current unsupervised learning methods, can be greatly reduced. By validation on both public and in-house datasets, the proposed deep constrained Gaussian network achieves significantly (Wilcoxon signed-rank test) better performance (with the average Dice scores of 0.737 and 0.735, respectively) on tissue segmentation with improved stability and robustness, compared to other existing unsupervised segmentation approaches. Furthermore, the proposed method presents a similar performance (p-value > 0.05) compared to the fully supervised U-Net.
Date Issued
2022-12
Date Acceptance
2022-07-26
Citation
IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 2022, 41 (12), pp.3799-3811
ISSN
0278-0062
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Start Page
3799
End Page
3811
Journal / Book Title
IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging
Volume
41
Issue
12
Copyright Statement
© 2022 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
Identifier
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9844771
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2022-07-29