Single-Shot Object Detection and Supervised Image Segmentation for Analysing Cell Images Obtained by Immunohistochemistry

• Gustavo Martins L. da Costa PUC Minas
• Anna P. C. Rodrigues PUC Minas
• Gabriel Barbosa da Fonseca PUC Minas
• Zenilton K. G. do Patrocínio Jr PUC Minas
• Giovanna Ribeiro Souto PUC Minas
• Silvio Jamil F. Guimarães PUC Minas

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/sibgrapi.est.2023.27463

Resumo

Analyzing cell images and identifying them correctly is a fundamental task in the immunohistochemical exam. In this paper we propose a novel method to segment FoxP3+ Regulatory T cells (Treg) images automatically, in order to assist healthcare professionals in the task of identifying and counting potentially cancerous cells. The proposed method relies on combining an object detection network, which is tailor-made for microscopy images, with a marker-based image segmentation method to produce the final segmentation, while requiring only a 50x50 training patch to do so. Our pipeline consists on predicting the location of the cells, applying morphological operations on the prediction weights to transform them into markers, and finally using the segmentation method iDISF to generate high quality segmentations. We also propose a new FoxP3+ Treg cells dataset containing 10 high resolution images, with a qualitative and quantitative analysis of our segmentation methods for this dataset.

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