Panoptic segmentation with an end-to-end cell R-CNN for pathology image analysis

The morphological clues of various cancer cells are essential for pathologists to determine the stages of cancers. In order to obtain the quantitative morphological information, we present an end-to-end network for panoptic segmentation of pathology images. Recently, many methods have been proposed, focusing on the semantic-level or instance-level cell segmentation. Unlike existing cell segmentation methods, the proposed network unifies detecting, localizing objects and assigning pixel-level class information to regions with large overlaps such as the background. This unifier is obtained by optimizing the novel semantic loss, the bounding box loss of Region Proposal Network (RPN), the classifier loss of RPN, the background-foreground classifier loss of segmentation Head instead of class-specific loss, the bounding box loss of proposed cell object, and the mask loss of cell object. The results demonstrate that the proposed method not only outperforms state-of-the-art approaches to the 2017 MICCAI Digital Pathology Challenge dataset, but also proposes an effective and end-to-end solution for the panoptic segmentation challenge.