Improved Segmentation of Cellular Nuclei Using UNET Architectures for Enhanced Pathology Imaging

Abstract

Medical imaging is essential for pathology diagnosis and treatment, enhancing decision making and reducing costs, but despite various computational methodologies proposed to improve imaging modalities, further optimization is needed for broader acceptance. This study explores deep learning (DL) methodologies for classifying and segmenting pathological imaging data, optimizing models to accurately predict and generalize from training to new data. Different CNN and U-Net architectures are implemented for segmentation tasks, with their performance evaluated on histological image datasets using enhanced pre-processing techniques such as resizing, normalization, and data augmentation. These are trained, parameterized, and optimized using metrics such as accuracy, the DICE coefficient, and intersection over union (IoU). The experimental results show that the proposed method improves the efficiency of cell segmentation compared to networks, such as U-NET and W-UNET. The results show that the proposed pre-processing has improved the IoU from 0.9077 to 0.9675, about 7% better results; also, the values of the DICE coefficient obtained improved from 0.9215 to 0.9916, about 7% better results, surpassing the results reported in the literature.