DoNet: Deep De-Overlapping Network for Cytology Instance Segmentation

Cell instance segmentation in cytology images has significant importance for biology analysis and cancer screening, while remains challenging due to 1) the extensive over-lapping translucent cell clusters that cause the ambigu-ous boundaries, and 2) the confusion of mimics and de-bris as nuclei. In this work, we proposed a De-overlapping Network (DoNet) in a decompose-and-recombined strategy. A Dual-path Region Segmentation Module (DRM) explicitly decomposes the cell clusters into intersection and complement regions, followed by a Semantic Consistency-guided Recombination Module (CRM) for integration. To further introduce the containment relationship of the nu-cleus in the cytoplasm, we design a Mask-guided Region Proposal Strategy (MRP) that integrates the cell attention maps for inner-cell instance prediction. We validate the proposed approach on ISBI2014 and CPS datasets. Ex-periments show that our proposed DoNet significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art (SOTA) cell instance segmentation methods. The code is available at https://github.com/DeepDoNet/DoNet.