Tissue Aware Nuclei Detection and Classification Model for Histopathology Images

Abstract: Accurate nuclei detection and classification are fundamental to computational pathology, yet existing approaches are hindered by reliance on detailed expert annotations and insufficient use of tissue context. We present Tissue-Aware Nuclei Detection (TAND), a novel framework achieving joint nuclei detection and classification using point-level supervision enhanced by tissue mask conditioning. TAND couples a ConvNeXt-based encoder-decoder with a frozen Virchow-2 tissue segmentation branch, where semantic tissue probabilities selectively modulate the classification stream through a novel multi-scale Spatial Feature-wise Linear Modulation (Spatial-FiLM). On the PUMA benchmark, TAND achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing both tissue-agnostic baselines and mask-supervised methods. Notably, our approach demonstrates remarkable improvements in tissue-dependent cell types such as epithelium, endothelium, and stroma. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first method to condition per-cell classification on learned tissue masks, offering a practical pathway to reduce annotation burden.