CellSAM: Advancing Pathologic Image Cell Segmentation via Asymmetric Large-Scale Vision Model Feature Distillation Aggregation Network

Abstract

Segment anything model (SAM) has attracted extensive interest as a potent large-scale image segmentation model, with prior efforts adapting it for use in medical imaging. However, the precise segmentation of cell nucleus instances remains a formidable challenge in computational pathology, given substantial morphological variations and the dense clustering of nuclei with unclear boundaries. This study presents an innovative cell segmentation algorithm named CellSAM. CellSAM has the potential to improve the effectiveness and precision of disease identification and therapy planning. As a variant of SAM, CellSAM integrates dual-image encoders and employs techniques such as knowledge distillation and mask fusion. This innovative model exhibits promising capabilities in capturing intricate cell structures and ensuring adaptability in resource-constrained scenarios. The experimental results indicate that this structure effectively enhances the quality and precision of cell segmentation. Remarkably, CellSAM demonstrates outstanding results even with minimal training data. In the evaluation of particular cell segmentation tasks, extensive comparative analyzes show that CellSAM outperforms both general fundamental models and state-of-the-art (SOTA) task-specific models. Comprehensive evaluation metrics yield scores of 0.884, 0.876, and 0.768 for mean accuracy, recall, and precision respectively. Extensive experiments show that CellSAM excels in capturing subtle details and complex structures and is capable of segmenting cells in images accurately. Additionally, CellSAM demonstrates excellent performance on clinical data, indicating its potential for robust applications in treatment planning and disease diagnosis, thereby further improving the efficiency of computer-aided medicine.