In cervical cancer screening, accurate segmentation of cervical nucleus is a key part in the early diagnosis of cervical cancer. However, the cervical nucleus segmentation faces many great challenges owing to the overlapping cervical cells, uneven staining and poor contrast of cervical cytology smear images. In this paper, a tree domain structure and screening algorithm based on depth-first searching strategy are proposed to obtain candidate nucleus regions according to the annular clustering characteristics of nucleus depth information in cervical cytology images. Then, the candidate nucleus regions are finely segmented with an iterative level set algorithm based on adaptive radius morphological dilation. Experimental results are evaluated on the ISBI2015 public dataset. The performance of the proposed nucleus segmentation algorithm is higher than that of the state-of-the-art methods in terms of positive predictive value, negative predictive value, precision, recall of the cervical nucleus segmentation.

Accurate segmentation of cervical nuclei is an essential step in the early diagnosis of cervical cancer. Still, there are few studies on the segmentation of clustered nuclei in clusters of cells. Because of the complexities of high cell overlap, blurred nuclei boundaries, and clustered cells, the accurate segmentation of clustered nuclei remains a pressing challenge. In this paper, we purposefully propose a GCP-Net deep learning network to handle the challenging cervical cluster cell images. The proposed U-Net-based GCP-Net consists of a pretrained ResNet-34 model as encoder, a Gating Context-aware Pooling (GCP) module, and a modified decoder. The GCP module is the primary building block of the network to improve the quality of feature learning. It allows the GCP-Net to refine details of feature maps leveraging multiscale context gating and Global Context Attention for the spatial and texture dependencies. The decoder block including Global Context Attention- (GCA-) Residual Block helps build long-range dependencies and global context interaction in the decoder to refine the predicted masks. We conducted extensive comparative experiments with seven existing models on our ClusteredCell dataset and three typical medical image datasets, respectively. The experimental results showed that the GCP-Net obtained promising results on three evaluation metrics AJI, Dice, and PQ, demonstrating the superiorities and generalizability of our GCP-Net for automatic medical image segmentation in comparison with some SOAT baselines.

The accurate segmentation of cervical cell images is one of the key steps of the cervical cancer computer-aided diagnosis system. For the problem of overlapping cell and boundary blurring in cervical cell clusters, the researchers propose a segmentation algorithm based on the nuclear radial boundary enhancement for overlapping cell of cervical cytology images. This method not only suppresses the noise of cervical cytology images but also preserves the contrast of overlapping cell boundary. The researchers generate the weight graph by the candidate contour points and contour line segment attributes and utilize the dynamic programming algorithm to find the shortest path in the weight graph. The shortest path corresponds to the coarse segmentation contour in the cell image. The level set model is used to finely segment the obtained coarse cell segmentation boundary, so as to obtain the final cervical cell boundary. Through the quantitative and qualitative evaluation results, such as dice similarity coefficient, true positive rate, and false positive rate, it can be seen that the overlapping cell segmentation algorithm in this paper has achieved better segmentation results. Compared with other current overlap cell segmentation algorithms, the segmentation results obtained in this paper have greater advantages.