Pathological Image Segmentation of Breast Cancer via Template Matching

Accurate pathological image segmentation is crucial for the clinical diagnosis of breast cancer. However, existing methods of pathological segmentation face challenges due to the variability and complexity of breast cancer on pathological images. To address these issues, we propose a novel segmentaion network called template-matching pathological segmentation network. Our method incorporates an innovative template matching strategy inspired by the diagnostic process of pathologists. The template matching strategy is to utilize visual transformer to establish a correlative relationship between cancer lesions and corresponding templates. To improve feature utilization of pathological images, PSVTNet introduces detailed information attention and information entropy attention. Detailed information attention aims to exploit detailed information by serving as the path connecting shallow-layer and deep-layer features. Meanwhile, information entropy attention can redistribute feature weights to high-entropy regions according to the information-entropy attention map. Additionally, this work releases a comprehensive pathological dataset that comprises labeled pathological images. These images are collected from breast and stomach cancers with hematoxylin&eosin and human epidermal growth factor receptor-2 staining. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PSVTNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on pathologic images of breast cancer, but can also process pathologic images of stomach cancer carrying with same diagnosed features as the breast cancer.