Simple non-iterative clustering and CNNs for coarse segmentation of breast cancer whole-slide images

Breast cancer is the dominant cancer among women as it accounts for about one-quarter of all cancer cases in females. The digitized images of Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) stained slides of breast cancer specimens carry valuable diagnostic information. However, inspecting these slides manually is a non-trivial task prone to subjective interpretation. Digital pathology (DP) and artificial intelligence (AI) open an opportunity for objective interpretation of the image data. It is challenging to automate the segmentation process in the whole slide images due to the visual complexity of tissue appearance without the need for tedious and time-consuming fine annotations. Many algorithms classify the tissue regions into different types instead of segmenting them, as the classification algorithms require coarse annotations that are easier to acquire. In this paper, we propose a new segmentation framework that combines the simple non-iterative clustering algorithm with a standard convolutional neural network (CNN) classifier to segment whole slide images into different tissue types. In addition, a graph-based post-processing step is applied to improve the framework segmentation performance further. The results show promising improvement to the CNN classifier based coarse segmentation, which would give better feasibility to quantify and study tissues’ mutual relationships.