Colorectal Cancer Tumor Grade Segmentation in Digital Histopathology Images: From Giga to Mini Challenge
This addresses the need for standardized and automated histopathological grading in colorectal cancer to reduce subjectivity and pathologist shortages, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods in a challenge format.
The paper organized a challenge to automate colorectal cancer tumor grading and segmentation using a dataset of 103 whole-slide images, where six teams outperformed a baseline Swin Transformer model with a 62.92 F-score.
Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most diagnosed cancer and the second leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide. Accurate histopathological grading of CRC is essential for prognosis and treatment planning but remains a subjective process prone to observer variability and limited by global shortages of trained pathologists. To promote automated and standardized solutions, we organized the ICIP Grand Challenge on Colorectal Cancer Tumor Grading and Segmentation using the publicly available METU CCTGS dataset. The dataset comprises 103 whole-slide images with expert pixel-level annotations for five tissue classes. Participants submitted segmentation masks via Codalab, evaluated using metrics such as macro F-score and mIoU. Among 39 participating teams, six outperformed the Swin Transformer baseline (62.92 F-score). This paper presents an overview of the challenge, dataset, and the top-performing methods