U-Star: AN Asymmetric U-Shaped Network Based on Element-Wise Multiplication to Segment Nuclei in H&E Stained Histological Images

Nuclei segmentation in Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) stained images plays a crucial role in cancer diagnosis and pathological evaluation, enabling pathologists to identify abnormal cells and assess their morphology and distribution. While current automated nuclei segmentation methods predominantly employ convolutional neural networks and attention mechanisms, the potential of element-wise multiplication has been largely unexplored. This paper introduces U-Star, a novel asymmetric segmentation network based on the star block that leverages element-wise multiplication. U-Star adopts the classic encoder-decoder architecture and innovatively implements star-connection as an alternative to traditional skip-connections. In experiments on an H&E stained image dataset, U-Star achieved superior performance with a Dice coefficient of 0.8783, accuracy of 0.9089, and IoU of 0.7929, significantly outperforming baseline models. Extensive ablation studies validate the effectiveness of the star-connection and demonstrate the advantages of our proposed framework. Beyond advancing the application of element-wise multiplication techniques, U-Star shows promising potential for broader applications in medical image segmentation.