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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Microbiol.
Sec. Systems Microbiology
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2024.1483052
This article is part of the Research Topic Artificial Intelligence in Pathogenic Microorganism Research View all 4 articles

WSSS-CRAM: Precise Segmentation of Histopathological Images via Class Region Activation Mapping

Provisionally accepted
  • Shandong Normal University, Jinan, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Fast, accurate, and automatic analysis of histopathological images using digital image processing and deep learning technology is a necessary task. Conventional histopathological image analysis algorithms require the manual design of features, while deep learning methods can achieve fast prediction and accurate analysis, but rely on the drive of a large amount of labeled data.In this work, we introduce WSSS-CRAM a weakly-supervised semantic segmentation that can obtain detailed pixel-level labels from image-level annotated data. Specifically, we use a discriminative activation strategy to generate category-specific image activation maps via class labels. The category-specific activation maps are then post-processed using conditional random fields to obtain reliable regions that are directly used as ground-truth labels for the segmentation branch. Critically, the two steps of the pseudo-label acquisition and training segmentation model are integrated into an end-to-end model for joint training in this method. Through quantitative evaluation and visualization results, we demonstrate that the framework can predict pixel-level labels from image-level labels, and also perform well when testing images without image-level annotations.

    Keywords: Histopathological image, Precise semantic segmentation, Weakly-supervised method, Category-specific image activation maps, deep learning

    Received: 19 Aug 2024; Accepted: 18 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Pan, Mi, Li, Ge, Sui and Jiang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Yanyun Jiang, Shandong Normal University, Jinan, China

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.