A Dilated Residual Hierarchically Fashioned Segmentation Framework for Extracting Gleason Tissues and Grading Prostate Cancer from Whole Slide Images (2011.00527v5)

Abstract: Prostate cancer (PCa) is the second deadliest form of cancer in males, and it can be clinically graded by examining the structural representations of Gleason tissues. This paper proposes \RV{a new method} for segmenting the Gleason tissues \RV{(patch-wise) in order to grade PCa from the whole slide images (WSI).} Also, the proposed approach encompasses two main contributions: 1) A synergy of hybrid dilation factors and hierarchical decomposition of latent space representation for effective Gleason tissues extraction, and 2) A three-tiered loss function which can penalize different semantic segmentation models for accurately extracting the highly correlated patterns. In addition to this, the proposed framework has been extensively evaluated on a large-scale PCa dataset containing 10,516 whole slide scans (with around 71.7M patches), where it outperforms state-of-the-art schemes by 3.22% (in terms of mean intersection-over-union) for extracting the Gleason tissues and 6.91% (in terms of F1 score) for grading the progression of PCa.