DFGET: Displacement-Field Assisted Graph Energy Transmitter for Gland Instance Segmentation

Gland instance segmentation is an essential but challenging task in the diagnosis of adenocarcinoma. The existing models usually achieve gland instance segmentation through multi-task learning and boundary loss constraint. However, how to deal with the problems of gland adhesion and inaccurate boundary in segmenting the complex samples remains a challenge. In this work, we propose a novel geometric feature named displacement field (DF), which can represent the geometric information such as shape, size, and orientation of the glands. Based on the explicit constraint of DF, a displacement-field assisted graph energy transmitter (DFGET) framework is proposed for solving the above problems. Using such graph framework, the gland semantic segmentation map and the displacement field of the graph nodes are estimated with two graph network branches. With the constraint of DF, a graph cluster module is presented to improve the intra-class feature consistency and inter-class feature discrepancy, as well as to separate the adherent glands. Extensive comparison and ablation experiments on the GlaS dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the displacement field and the superiority of DFGET. Compared to the best comparative model, DFGET increases the object-Dice and object-F1 score by 2.27% and 3.11% respectively, while decreases the object-HD by 15.58, achieving state-of-the-art performance, which indicates that DFGET can serve as an auxiliary tool for the diagnosis of adenocarcinoma.