Deep learning‐based semantic segmentation of interphase cells and debris from metaphase images

Abstract Segmentation plays an essential role in the design of the automated karyotyping system (AKS). It is pivotal to segment interphase cells and other debris usually found in the input G metaphase images. The performance of AKSs is considerably less when interphase cells and debris are present in the input images. In this article, two semantic segmentation models are proposed. For this experiment, an annotated dataset is generated from the G banded metaphase images which are prepared at Regional Cancer Centre (RCC), Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India. Inspired by the results of UNet, a lighter version L‐UNet is developed and experimented with. It shows the validation IoU (Intersection over Union) of 0.9809 and F1‐score of 0.9903 on the RCC dataset and the test IoU of 0.9720 and F1‐score of 0.9858 on the CRCN‐NE dataset. As backbone semantic segmentation models are state of the art, an efficient model, Eff‐UNet, is also proposed here. In this model, EfficientNetB03 acts as the backbone that extracts powerful features and UNet acts as the decoder that predicts the segmentation map. It performs with the validation IoU of 0.9842 and F1‐score of 0.9920 on the RCC dataset and the test IoU of 0.7545 and F1‐score of 0.7778 on the CRCN‐NE dataset. To derive this model, 25 encoder–decoder architectures are evaluated with various top‐performing CNNs (convolutional neural networks) as encoders and segmentation networks as decoders. Results are further compared with various segmentation models and the best results are obtained from the proposed model.