The Contrastive Network With Convolution and Self-Attention Mechanisms for Unsupervised Cell Segmentation

Deep learning for cell instance segmentation is a significant research direction in biomedical image analysis. The traditional supervised learning methods rely on pixel-wise annotation of object images to train the models, which is often accompanied by time-consuming and labor-intensive. Various modified segmentation methods, based on weakly supervised or semi-supervised learning, have been proposed to recognize cell regions by only using rough annotations of cell positions. However, it is still hard to achieve the fully unsupervised in most approaches that the utilization of few annotations for training is still inevitable. In this article, we propose an end-to-end unsupervised model that can segment individual cell regions on hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stained slides without any annotation. Compared with weakly or semi-supervised methods, the input of our model is in the form of raw data without any identifiers and there is no need to generate pseudo-labelling during training. We demonstrated that the performance of our model is satisfactory and also has a great generalization ability on various validation sets compared with supervised models. The ablation experiment shows that our backbone has superior performance in capturing object edge and context information than pure CNN or transformer under our unsupervised method.