Sparse Coding Driven Deep Decision Tree Ensembles for Nucleus Segmentation in Digital Pathology Images.

Abstract

Automating generalized nucleus segmentation has proven to be non-trivial and challenging in digital pathology. Most existing techniques in the field rely either on deep neural networks or on shallow learning-based cascading models. The former lacks theoretical understanding and tends to degrade performance when only limited amounts of training data are available while the latter often suffers from limitations for generalization. To address these issues, we propose sparse coding driven deep decision tree ensembles (ScD²TE), an easily trained yet powerful representation learning approach with performance highly competitive to deep neural networks in the generalized nucleus segmentation task. We explore the possibility of stacking several layers based on fast convolutional sparse coding-decision tree ensemble pairwise modules and generate a layer-wise encoder-decoder architecture with intra-decoder and inter-encoder dense connectivity patterns. Under this architecture, all the encoders share the same assumption across the different layers to represent images and interact with their decoders to give fast convergence. Compared with deep neural networks, our proposed ScD²TE does not require back-propagation computation and depends on less hyper-parameters. ScD²TE is able to achieve a fast end-to-end pixel-wise training in a layer-wise manner. We demonstrated the superiority of our segmentation method by evaluating it on the multi-disease state and multi-organ dataset where consistently higher performances were obtained for comparison against other state-of-the-art deep learning techniques and cascading methods with various connectivity patterns.