Background: Automated pathology techniques for detecting cervical cancer at the premalignant stage have advantages for women in areas with limited medical resources.
Methods: This article presents EpithNet, a deep learning approach for the critical step of automated epithelium segmentation in digitized cervical histology images. EpithNet employs three regression networks of varying dimensions of image input blocks (patches) surrounding a given pixel, with all blocks at a fixed resolution, using varying network depth.
Results: The proposed model was evaluated on 311 digitized histology epithelial images and the results indicate that the technique maximizes region-based information to improve pixel-wise probability estimates. EpithNet-mc model, formed by intermediate concatenation of the convolutional layers of the three models, was observed to achieve 94% Jaccard index (intersection over union) which is 26.4% higher than the benchmark model.
Conclusions: EpithNet yields better epithelial segmentation results than state-of-the-art benchmark methods.
Keywords: Cervical cancer; cervical intraepithelial neoplasia; convolutional neural network; deep learning; image processing; segmentation.
Copyright: © 2020 Journal of Pathology Informatics.