Glomeruli Segmentation in Whole-Slide Images: Is Better Local Performance Always Better?

  • Maria Sánchez
  • , Helena Sánchez
  • , Carlos Pérez de Arenaza
  • , David Ribalta
  • , Nerea Arrarte
  • , Oscar Cámara
  • , Adrian Galdran*
  • *Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

We consider the task of glomeruli segmentation from Whole-Slide Images (WSIs) of pathological kidneys. In particular, we compare the performance of two different encoder-decoder architectures for two tasks: local segmentation of patches extracted from a large WSI, and global segmentation of the entire image. Since segmenting high-resolution WSIs is extremely memory-demanding, a typical approach for this task is to break down these images offline, train a patch-wise segmentation model, and then use a sliding-window inference scheme to stitch back the resulting patch segmentations. Contrary to intuition, we observe in our experiments that a model with higher segmentation accuracy at the patch level can incur in large underperformance gaps at the WSI level, even more so when measuring performance as an instance segmentation problem. This work was carried out in the context of the Kidney Pathology Image Segmentation (KPIs) challenge, which took place jointly with MICCAI 2024, and the best patch-level model we present here ranked second in the final hidden test set of the competition. Code to reproduce our experiments is shared at github.com/agaldran/kpis.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMedical Optical Imaging and Virtual Microscopy Image Analysis - Second International Workshop, MOVI 2024, Held in Conjunction with MICCAI 2024, Proceedings
EditorsYuankai Huo, Bryan A. Millis, Yuyin Zhou, Khaled Younis, Xiao Wang, Yucheng Tang
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages210-217
Number of pages8
ISBN (Print)9783031777851
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2025
Externally publishedYes
Event2nd International Workshop on Medical Optical Imaging and Virtual Microscopy Image Analysis, MOVI 2024, held in conjunction with 26th International Conference on Medical Imaging and Computer-Assisted Intervention, MICCAI 2024 - Marrakesh, Morocco
Duration: 10 Oct 202410 Oct 2024

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume15371 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference2nd International Workshop on Medical Optical Imaging and Virtual Microscopy Image Analysis, MOVI 2024, held in conjunction with 26th International Conference on Medical Imaging and Computer-Assisted Intervention, MICCAI 2024
Country/TerritoryMorocco
CityMarrakesh
Period10/10/2410/10/24

Keywords

  • Kidney Pathology Image segmentation
  • Whole Slide Image Segmentation

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