EOFD-Net: Edge Optimization and Feature Denoising for Weakly Supervised Deep Nuclei Segmentation with Point Annotations

Nuclei segmentation is a fundamental and critical step in digital pathological image analysis. Fully supervised nuclei segmentation requires a lot of pixel-by-pixel manual annotation by pathologists, which is very time-consuming and laborious. To minimize the labeling burden of pathologists, this paper uses only point annotations of nuclei data for weakly supervised learning. Specifically, a two-stage model named EOFD-Net with feature denoising and edge optimization is proposed. In the first stage, three weak labels (K-means cluster labels, Voronoi labels, and superpixel labels) with complementary information are used to train the encoder-decoder network to achieve coarse segmentation of nuclei. A feature denoising module(FDM) is designed in the encoder part, which can effectively reduce noise interference. In the second stage, we designed an edge optimization strategy using the prior knowledge of the trained model in the first stage. Confident learning is employed to denoise pseudo-label and rectify the mislabel. These optimized labels are input into the second stage to obtain the final segmentation results. The performance of our method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods on two publicly nuclei segmentation datasets, MoNuSeg and TNBC.