DDTNet: A dense dual-task network for tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte detection and segmentation in histopathological images of breast cancer

The morphological evaluation of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) in hematoxylin and eosin (H& E)-stained histopathological images is the key to breast cancer (BCa) diagnosis, prognosis, and therapeutic response prediction. For now, the qualitative assessment of TILs is carried out by pathologists, and computer-aided automatic lymphocyte measurement is still a great challenge because of the small size and complex distribution of lymphocytes. In this paper, we propose a novel dense dual-task network (DDTNet) to simultaneously achieve automatic TIL detection and segmentation in histopathological images. DDTNet consists of a backbone network (i.e., feature pyramid network) for extracting multi-scale morphological characteristics of TILs, a detection module for the localization of TIL centers, and a segmentation module for the delineation of TIL boundaries, where a boundary-aware branch is further used to provide a shape prior to segmentation. An effective feature fusion strategy is utilized to introduce multi-scale features with lymphocyte location information from highly correlated branches for precise segmentation. Experiments on three independent lymphocyte datasets of BCa demonstrate that DDTNet outperforms other advanced methods in detection and segmentation metrics. As part of this work, we also propose a semi-automatic method (TILAnno) to generate high-quality boundary annotations for TILs in H& E-stained histopathological images. TILAnno is used to produce a new lymphocyte dataset that contains 5029 annotated lymphocyte boundaries, which have been released to facilitate computational histopathology in the future.