Simultaneous segmentation and classification of nuclei in digital histology play an essential role in computer-assisted cancer diagnosis; however, it remains challenging. The highest achieved binary and multi-class Panoptic Quality (PQ) remains as low as 0.68 bPQ and 0.49 mPQ, respectively. It is due to the higher staining variability, variability across the tissue, rough clinical conditions, overlapping nuclei, and nuclear class imbalance. The generic deep-learning methods usually rely on end-to-end models, which fail to address these problems associated explicitly with digital histology. In our previous work, DAN-NucNet, we resolved these issues for semantic segmentation with an end-to-end model. This work extends our previous model to simultaneous instance segmentation and classification. We introduce additional decoder heads with independent weighted losses, which produce semantic segmentation, edge proposals, and classification maps. We use the outputs from the three-head model to apply post-processing to produce the final segmentation and classification. Our multi-stage approach utilizes edge proposals and semantic segmentations compared to direct segmentation and classification strategies followed by most state-of-the-art methods. Due to this, we demonstrate a significant performance improvement in producing high-quality instance segmentation and nuclei classification. We have achieved a 0.841 Dice score for semantic segmentation, 0.713 bPQ scores for instance segmentation, and 0.633 mPQ for nuclei classification. Our proposed framework is generalized across 19 types of tissues. Furthermore, the framework is less complex compared to the state-of-the-art.

通过引入附加的解码器头部使用独立的加权损失函数，该研究提出了对数字组织学中核的同时实例分割和分类的多阶段方法，以在高质量实例分割和核分类方面取得了显著的性能改进，并且在19种类型的组织上具有广泛的适用性和较低的复杂性。

A three in one bottom-up framework for simultaneous semantic
  segmentation, instance segmentation and classification of multi-organ nuclei
  in digital cancer histology

数字癌症组织的多器官细胞核同时语义分割、实例分割和分类的自底向上三合一框架