NuSEA: Nuclei Segmentation With Ellipse Annotations

Zhu Meng, Junhao Dong, Binyu Zhang, Shichao Li, Ruixiao Wu, Fei Su, Guangxi Wang, Limei Guo, Zhicheng Zhao

Abstract: Objective: Nuclei segmentation is a crucial pre-task for pathological microenvironment quantification. However, the acquisition of manually precise nuclei annotations for improving the performance of deep learning models is time-consuming and expensive. Methods: In this paper, an efficient nuclear annotation tool called NuSEA is proposed to achieve accurate nucleus segmentation, where a simple but effective ellipse annotation is applied. Specifically, the core network U-Light of NuSEA is lightweight with only 0.86 M parameters, which is suitable for real-time nuclei segmentation. In addition, an Elliptical Field Loss and a Texture Loss are proposed to enhance the edge segmentation and constrain the smoothness simultaneously. Results: Extensive experiments on three public datasets (MoNuSeg, CPM-17, and CoNSeP) demonstrate that NuSEA is superior to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods and better than existing algorithms based on point, rectangle, and text annotations. Conclusions: With the assistance of NuSEA, a new dataset called NuSEA-dataset v1.0, encompassing 118,857 annotated nuclei from the whole-slide images of 12 organs is released. Significance: NuSEA provides a rapid and effective annotation tool for nuclei in histopathological images, benefiting future explorations in deep learning algorithms.