The presence of tertiary lymphoid structures (TLSs) on pancreatic pathological images is an important prognostic indicator of pancreatic tumors. Therefore, TLSs detection on pancreatic pathological images plays a crucial role in diagnosis and treatment for patients with pancreatic tumors. However, fully supervised detection algorithms based on deep learning usually require a large number of manual annotations, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. In this paper, we aim to detect the TLSs in a manner of few-shot learning by proposing a weakly supervised segmentation network. We firstly obtain the lymphocyte density maps by combining a pretrained model for nuclei segmentation and a domain adversarial network for lymphocyte nuclei recognition. Then, we establish a cross-scale attention guidance mechanism by jointly learning the coarse-scale features from the original histopathology images and fine-scale features from our designed lymphocyte density attention. A noise-sensitive constraint is introduced by an embedding signed distance function loss in the training procedure to reduce tiny prediction errors. Experimental results on two collected datasets demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art segmentation-based algorithms in terms of TLSs detection accuracy. Additionally, we apply our method to study the congruent relationship between the density of TLSs and peripancreatic vascular invasion and obtain some clinically statistical results.

通过提出一种弱监督分割网络，本研究旨在通过少样本学习的方式检测胰腺病理图像上的淋巴结密度结构（TLSs），并在两个收集的数据集上的实验结果表明，该方法在TLSs检测准确性方面显著优于最先进的基于分割的算法。

A Weakly Supervised Segmentation Network Embedding Cross-scale Attention
  Guidance and Noise-sensitive Constraint for Detecting Tertiary Lymphoid
  Structures of Pancreatic Tumors

一种弱监督分段网络嵌入了跨尺度注意引导和对胰腺肿瘤的噪声敏感约束用于检测胰腺肿瘤的第三淋巴结结构