Multi-scale Regional Attention Deeplab3+: Multiple Myeloma Plasma Cells Segmentation in Microscopic Images
This work addresses the need for automated diagnosis of multiple myeloma, a blood cancer, but is incremental as it builds on existing deep learning techniques for medical image segmentation.
The authors tackled the problem of automatically detecting and segmenting multiple myeloma plasma cells in microscopic images by developing a two-stage deep learning method with multi-scale processing, achieving second place in the SegPC2021 grand-challenge test phase.
Multiple myeloma cancer is a type of blood cancer that happens when the growth of abnormal plasma cells becomes out of control in the bone marrow. There are various ways to diagnose multiple myeloma in bone marrow such as complete blood count test (CBC) or counting myeloma plasma cell in aspirate slide images using manual visualization or through image processing technique. In this work, an automatic deep learning method for the detection and segmentation of multiple myeloma plasma cell have been explored. To this end, a two-stage deep learning method is designed. In the first stage, the nucleus detection network is utilized to extract each instance of a cell of interest. The extracted instance is then fed to the multi-scale function to generate a multi-scale representation. The objective of the multi-scale function is to capture the shape variation and reduce the effect of object scale on the cytoplasm segmentation network. The generated scales are then fed into a pyramid of cytoplasm networks to learn the segmentation map in various scales. On top of the cytoplasm segmentation network, we included a scale aggregation function to refine and generate a final prediction. The proposed approach has been evaluated on the SegPC2021 grand-challenge and ranked second on the final test phase among all teams.