An Automatic Nuclei Segmentation on Microscopic Images using Deep Residual U-Net

Abstract

Nuclei Segmentation is the preliminary step towards the task of medical image analysis. Nowadays, there exists several deep learning-based techniques based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for the task of nuclei segmentation. In this study, we present a neural network for semantic segmentation. This network harnesses the strengths in both residual learning and U-Net methodologies, thereby amplifying cell segmentation performance. This hybrid approach also facilitates the creation of network with diminished parameter requirement. The network incorporates residual units contributes to a smoother training process and mitigate the issue of vanishing gradients. Our model is tested on a microscopy image dataset which is publicly available from the 2018 Data Science Bowl grand challenge and assessed against U-Net and several other state-of-the-art deep learning approaches designed for nuclei segmentation. Our proposed approach showcases a notable improvement in average Intersection over Union (IoU) gain compared to prevailing state-of-the-art techniques, by exhibiting a significant margin of 1.1% and 5.8% higher gains over the original U-Net. Our model also excels across various key indicators, including accuracy, precision, recall and dice-coefficient. The outcomes underscore the potential of our proposed approach as a promising nuclei segmentation method for microscopy image analysis.