CTI-Unet: Cascaded Threshold Integration for Improved U-Net Segmentation of Pathology Images
This addresses the need for precise image analysis in chronic kidney disease diagnosis, offering a robust framework for clinical workflows.
The paper tackled the problem of automated segmentation of kidney pathology images by proposing CTI-Unet, which outperformed state-of-the-art models like nnU-Net, Swin-Unet, and CE-Net on the KPIs2024 dataset.
Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a growing global health concern, necessitating precise and efficient image analysis to aid diagnosis and treatment planning. Automated segmentation of kidney pathology images plays a central role in facilitating clinical workflows, yet conventional segmentation models often require delicate threshold tuning. This paper proposes a novel \textit{Cascaded Threshold-Integrated U-Net (CTI-Unet)} to overcome the limitations of single-threshold segmentation. By sequentially integrating multiple thresholded outputs, our approach can reconcile noise suppression with the preservation of finer structural details. Experiments on the challenging KPIs2024 dataset demonstrate that CTI-Unet outperforms state-of-the-art architectures such as nnU-Net, Swin-Unet, and CE-Net, offering a robust and flexible framework for kidney pathology image segmentation.