FRE-Net: Full-region enhanced network for nuclei segmentation in histopathology images

Accurate nuclei segmentation is a critical step for physicians to achieve essential information about a patient’s disease through digital pathology images, enabling an effective diagnosis and evaluation of subsequent treatments. Since pathology images contain many nuclei, manual segmentation is time-consuming and error-prone. Therefore, developing a precise and automatic method for nuclei segmentation is urgent. This paper proposes a novel multi-task segmentation network that incorporates background and contour segmentation into the nuclei segmentation method and produces more accurate segmentation results. The convolution and attention modules are merged with the model to increase its global focus and enhance good segmentation results indirectly. We propose a reverse feature enhance module for contour extraction that facilitates feature integration between auxiliary tasks. The multi-feature fusion module is embedded in the final decoding branch to use different levels of features from auxiliary segmentation branches with varying concerns. We evaluate the proposed method on four challenging nuclei segmentation datasets. The proposed method achieves excellent performance on all four datasets. We found that the Dice coefficient reached 0.8563±0.0323, 0.8183±0.0383, 0.9222±0.0216, and 0.9220±0.0602 on the TNBC, MoNuSeg, KMC, and Glas. Our method produces better boundary accuracy and less sticking than other end-to-end segmentation methods. The results show that our method can perform better than other proposed state-of-the-art methods.