Enhanced Rotation-Equivariant U-Net for Nuclear Segmentation

Benjamin Chidester, That-Vinh Ton, Minh-Triet Tran, Jian Ma, Minh N. Do

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 stillmaintaining a speed of inference that is sufficient for realworld applications, in particular, analyzing whole-slide images (WSIs). Code for our enhanced U-Net is available at https://github.com/thatvinhton/G-U-Net.