MIU-Net: MIX-Attention and Inception U-Net for Histopathology Image Nuclei Segmentation

In the medical field, hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-stained histopathology images of cell nuclei analysis represent an important measure for cancer diagnosis. The most valuable aspect of the nuclei analysis is the segmentation of the different nuclei morphologies of different organs and subsequent diagnosis of the type and severity of the disease based on pathology. In recent years, deep learning techniques have been widely used in digital histopathology analysis. Automated nuclear segmentation technology enables the rapid and efficient segmentation of tens of thousands of complex and variable nuclei in histopathology images. However, a challenging problem during nuclei segmentation is the blocking of cell nuclei, overlapping, and background complexity of the tissue fraction. To address this challenge, we present MIU-net, an efficient deep learning network structure for the nuclei segmentation of histopathology images. Our proposed structure includes two blocks with modified inception module and attention module. The advantage of the modified inception module is to balance the computation and network performance of the deeper layers of the network, combined with the convolutional layer using different sizes of kernels to learn effective features in a fast and efficient manner to complete kernel segmentation. The attention module allows us to extract small and fine irregular boundary features from the images, which can better segment cancer cells that appear disorganized and fragmented. We test our methodology on public kumar datasets and achieve the highest AUC score of 0.92. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better performance than other state-of-the-art methods.