Domain-specific Knowledge Guided Self-supervised Learning for Pathological Image Segmentation

Self-supervised learning provides a possible solution to extract effective visual representations from unlabeled pathological images. However, most of the existing methods either do not effectively utilize domain-specific information or are designed and optimized for image classification, resulting in these pre-trained models that may not be optimal for pathological image segmentation. In this paper, we propose DKSL: Domain-specific Knowledge guided Self-supervised Learning, which uses image reconstruction tasks to aid contrastive learning and exploits single-dye stained pathological images after stain separation as domain-specific knowledge to guide the model. Our method provides a novel way to exploit the domain-specific knowledge of pathological images. In contrastive learning, we add single-dye stained images as an expansion of the original positive samples to the contrastive learning process to preserve more global semantic information. In image reconstruction, the model is forced to focus on local image details relevant to downstream tasks by reconstructing single-dye stained images from the representation extracted by the encoder of contrastive learning. Finally, the encoder and decoder from the pre-training stage are fine-tuned by the downstream segmentation task. Fine-tuning experimental results demonstrate that DKSL outperforms state-of-the-art methods with Dices of 90.50% and 79.68% on two publicly available datasets, GlaS and MoNuSeg, respectively.