Bone Marrow Cell Segmentation Based on Improved U-Net

Lingmin Jin, Zhaochai Yu, Haoyi Fan, Shenghua Teng, Zuoyong Li

Abstract: Automatic segmentation of bone marrow cells plays an important role in the diagnosis of many blood diseases such as anemia and leukemia. Due to the complex morphology and wide variety of bone marrow cells, their segmentation is still a challenging task. To improve the accuracy of bone marrow cell segmentation, we propose an end-to-end U-shaped network based on the pyramid residual convolution and the attention mechanism. Specifically, the standard convolution and dilated convolution are combined as its feature encoder, which designs a pyramid residual convolution block to extract multi-scale features. Then, the attention gating mechanism is introduced into each skip connection module for fusing the shallow and deep information. Finally, the proposed method combines convolution and deconvolution for feature decoding to achieve the final segmentation of bone marrow cells. Experiments with quantitative and qualitative comparisons are carried out on a self-built bone marrow smear dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over several state-of-the-art methods.