WSSS-CRAM: precise segmentation of histopathological images via class region activation mapping

Introduction: Fast, accurate, and automatic analysis of histopathological images using digital image processing and deep learning technology is a necessary task. Conventional histopathological image analysis algorithms require the manual design of features, while deep learning methods can achieve fast prediction and accurate analysis, but rely on the drive of a large amount of labeled data. Methods: In this work, we introduce WSSS-CRAM a weakly-supervised semantic segmentation that can obtain detailed pixel-level labels from image-level annotated data. Specifically, we use a discriminative activation strategy to generate category-specific image activation maps via class labels. The category-specific activation maps are then post-processed using conditional random fields to obtain reliable regions that are directly used as ground-truth labels for the segmentation branch. Critically, the two steps of the pseudo-label acquisition and training segmentation model are integrated into an end-to-end model for joint training in this method. Results: Through quantitative evaluation and visualization results, we demonstrate that the framework can predict pixel-level labels from image-level labels, and also perform well when testing images without image-level annotations. Discussion: Future, we consider extending the algorithm to different pathological datasets and types of tissue images to validate its generalization capability.