CrossLinkNet: An Explainable and Trustworthy AI Framework for Whole-Slide Images Segmentation

In the intelligent medical diagnosis area,Artificial Intelligence(AI)’s trustworthiness,reliability,and interpretability are critical,especially in cancer diagnosis.Traditional neural networks,while excellent at processing natural images,often lack interpretability and adaptability when processing high-resolution digital pathological images.This limitation is particularly evident in pathological diagnosis,which is the gold standard of cancer diagnosis and relies on a pathologist’s careful examination and analysis of digital pathological slides to identify the features and progression of the disease.Therefore,the integration of interpretable AI into smart medical diagnosis is not only an inevitable technological trend but also a key to improving diagnostic accuracy and reliability.In this paper,we introduce an innovative Multi-Scale Multi-Branch Feature Encoder(MSBE)and present the design of the CrossLinkNet Framework.The MSBE enhances the network’s capability for feature extraction by allowing the adjustment of hyperparameters to configure the number of branches and modules.The CrossLinkNet Framework,serving as a versatile image segmentation network architecture,employs cross-layer encoder-decoder connections for multi-level feature fusion,thereby enhancing feature integration and segmentation accuracy.Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on two datasets demonstrate that CrossLinkNet,equipped with the MSBE encoder,not only achieves accurate segmentation results but is also adaptable to various tumor segmentation tasks and scenarios by replacing different feature encoders.Crucially,CrossLinkNet emphasizes the interpretability of the AI model,a crucial aspect for medical professionals,providing an in-depth understanding of the model’s decisions and thereby enhancing trust and reliability in AI-assisted diagnostics.

Hybrid model enabling highly efficient follicular segmentation in thyroid cytopathological whole slide image

Background The prevalence of thyroid cancer is growing rapidly.Early and precise diagnosis is critical in thy-roid cancer caring.An automatic thyroid cancer diagnostic tool can be valuable to achieve early detection and diagnostic consistency.Only the follicular areas in the sample contain useful information to the thyroid cancer diagnosis based on fine needle aspiration(FNA).This study aimed to develop a highly efficient accurate method for follicular cell areas segmentation(FCAS)of thyroid cytopathological whole slide images(WSIs).Methods A total of 96 cell samples from July 2017 to July 2018 were collected in one hospital in Beijing,China.Forty-three WSIs were selected and manually labeled,including 17 cases of papillary thyroid carci-noma sample and 26 cases of benign sample.Six thousand and nine hundred cropped typical image patches(available on https://github.com/bupt-ai-cz/Hybrid-Model-Enabling-Highly-Efficient-Follicular-Segmentation)of 1024×1024 pixels from 13 large WSIs were used for patch-level model training and testing and all of the 13 large WSIs were papillary thyroid carcinoma samples.Thirty testing WSIs with an average size 36,217×29,400(from 10,240×10,240 to 81,920×61,440)were used to test the effectiveness of the hybrid model.Based on the traditional semantic segmentation model deeplabv3,we constructed a hybrid segmentation architecture by adding a classification branch into the segmentation scheme to improve efficiency.Accuracy was used to measure the performance of the classification model;pixel accuracy(pAcc),mean accuracy(mAcc),mean intersection over union(mIoU),and frequency weighted intersection over union(fwIoU)were used to measure the performance of the segmentation model,respectively.Results Using this method,up to 93%WSI segmentation time was reduced by skipping the colloidal areas and the blank background areas.The average processing time of 30 WSI was 49.49 s.On the patch dataset,this hybrid model might reach pAcc=98.65%,mAcc=85.60%,mIoU=79.61%,and fwIoU=97.54%.On the WSI dataset,this model might reach pAcc=99.30%,mAcc=68.94%,mIoU=58.21%,and fwIoU=99.50%.Conclusion The proposed hybrid method might significantly improve previous solutions and achieve the superior performance of efficiency and accuracy.