Enhanced Rotation-Equivariant U-Net for Nuclear Segmentation

Abstract

Despite recent advances in deep learning, the crucial task of nuclear segmentation for computational pathology remains challenging. Recently, deep learning, and specifically U-Nets, have shown significant improvements for this task, but there is still room for improvement by further enhancing the design and training of U-Nets for nuclear segmentation. Specifically, we consider enforcing rotation equivariance in the network, the placement of residual blocks, and applying novel data augmentation designed specifically for histopathology images, and show the relative improvement and merit of each. Incorporating all of these enhancements in the design and training of a U-Net yields significantly improved segmentation results while still maintaining a speed of inference that is sufficient for real-world applications, in particular, analyzing whole-slide images (WSIs). Code for our enhanced U-Net is available at https://github.com/thatvinhton/G-U-Net.