A Medically Assisted Model for Precise Segmentation of Osteosarcoma Nuclei on Pathological Images

• Published in: IEEE journal of biomedical and health informatics 2023-08, Vol.27 (8), p.1-12
• Main Authors: Wu, Jia, Yuan, Tingyu, Zeng, Jiachen, Gou, Fangfang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bone cancer; Bone Neoplasms - diagnostic imaging; Bone tumors; Cancer; Cell Nucleus; Data enhancement; Diagnosis; edge enhancement; Hardware; Humans; Image edge detection; Image enhancement; Image processing; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted - methods; Image segmentation; Malignancy; Medical diagnosis; Medical diagnostic imaging; Medical imaging; Medical services; Osteosarcoma; Osteosarcoma - diagnostic imaging; pathological image; Pathology; Sarcoma; Semantic segmentation; Software; stain normalization
• ISSN: 2168-2194; 2168-2208
• DOI: 10.1109/JBHI.2023.3278303

Osteosarcoma is the most common malignant bone tumor with a high degree of malignancy and misdiagnosis rates. Pathological images are crucial for its diagnosis. However, underdeveloped regions currently lack sufficient high-level pathologists, leading to uncertain diagnostic accuracy and efficiency. Existing research on pathological image segmentation often neglects the differences in staining styles and lack of data, without considering medical backgrounds. To alleviate the difficulty in diagnosing osteosarcoma in underdeveloped areas, an intelligent assisted diagnosis and treatment scheme for osteosarcoma pathological images, ENMViT, is proposed. ENMViT utilizes KIN to achieve normalization of mismatched images with limited GPU resources and uses traditional data enhancement methods, such as cleaning, cropping, mosaic, Laplacian sharpening, and other techniques to alleviate the issue of insufficient data. A multi-path semantic segmentation network combining Transformer and CNN is used to segment images, and the degree of edge offset in the spatial domain is introduced into the loss function. Finally, noise is filtered according to the size of the connecting domain. This paper experimented on more than 2000 osteosarcoma pathological images from Central South University. The experimental results demonstrate that this scheme performs well in each stage of the osteosarcoma pathological image processing, and the segmentation results' IoU index is 9.4% higher than the comparative models, demonstrating its significant value in the medical industry.