Deeply supervised UNet for semantic segmentation to assist dermatopathological assessment of Basal Cell Carcinoma (BCC)
This work addresses the need for accurate and fast pathological assessment in dermatology, though it is incremental as it builds on existing UNet architectures with modifications like deep supervision.
The paper tackled the problem of assisting dermatopathologists in assessing Basal Cell Carcinoma resection margins by developing a deep learning method for semantic segmentation on Whole Slide Images, achieving over 96% accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity on a test set of 650 WSIs.
Accurate and fast assessment of resection margins is an essential part of a dermatopathologist's clinical routine. In this work, we successfully develop a deep learning method to assist the pathologists by marking critical regions that have a high probability of exhibiting pathological features in Whole Slide Images (WSI). We focus on detecting Basal Cell Carcinoma (BCC) through semantic segmentation using several models based on the UNet architecture. The study includes 650 WSI with 3443 tissue sections in total. Two clinical dermatopathologists annotated the data, marking tumor tissues' exact location on 100 WSI. The rest of the data, with ground-truth section-wise labels, is used to further validate and test the models. We analyze two different encoders for the first part of the UNet network and two additional training strategies: a) deep supervision, b) linear combination of decoder outputs, and obtain some interpretations about what the network's decoder does in each case. The best model achieves over 96%, accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity on the test set.