Deep Features Aggregation-Based Joint Segmentation of Cytoplasm and Nuclei in White Blood Cells

White blood cells (WBCs), also known as leukocytes, are one of the valuable parts of the blood and immune system. Typically, pathologists use microscope for the manual inspection of blood smears which is a time-consuming, error-prone, and labor-intensive procedure. To address these issues, we present two novel shallow networks: a leukocyte deep segmentation network (LDS-Net) and leukocyte deep aggregation segmentation network (LDAS-Net) for the joint segmentation of cytoplasm and nuclei in WBC images. LDS-Net is a shallow architecture with three downsampling stages and seven convolution layers. LDAS-Net is an extended version of LDS-Net that utilizes a novel pool-less low-level information transfer bridge to transfer low-level information to the deep layers of the network. This information is aggregated with deep features in a dense feature concatenation block to achieve accurate cytoplasm and nuclei joint segmentation. We evaluated our developed architectures on four WBC publicly available datasets. For cytoplasmic segmentation in WBCs, the proposed method achieved the dice coefficients of 98.97%, 99.0%, 96.05%, and 98.79% on Datasets 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively. For nuclei segmentation, the dice coefficients of 96.35% and 98.09% are achieved for Datasets 1 and 2, respectively. Proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods with superior computational efficiency and requires only 6.5 million trainable parameters.

Automated summary

This study introduces two novel shallow networks for joint segmentation of cytoplasm and nuclei in white blood cell images. The proposed method achieves high segmentation accuracy on multiple publicly available datasets with superior computational efficiency and requires a small number of trainable parameters.