Cross-Task Pretraining for Cross-Organ Cross-Scanner Adenocarcinoma Segmentation

TL;DR

A solution to the COSAS 2024 competition on Cross-Organ and Cross-Scanner Adenocarcinoma Segmentation from histopathological image patches attempted to bridge the domain shift gap by experimenting with three different strategies: standard training for each dataset, pretraining on dataset T1 and then fine-tuning on dataset T2, and training on the combination of dataset A and B.

Abstract

This short abstract describes a solution to the COSAS 2024 competition on Cross-Organ and Cross-Scanner Adenocarcinoma Segmentation from histopathological image patches. The main challenge in the task of segmenting this type of cancer is a noticeable domain shift encountered when changing acquisition devices (microscopes) and also when tissue comes from different organs. The two tasks proposed in COSAS were to train on a dataset of images from three different organs, and then predict segmentations on data from unseen organs (dataset T1), and to train on a dataset of images acquired on three different scanners and then segment images acquired with another unseen microscope. We attempted to bridge the domain shift gap by experimenting with three different strategies: standard training for each dataset, pretraining on dataset T1 and then fine-tuning on dataset T2 (and vice-versa, a strategy we call \textit{Cross-Task Pretraining}), and training on the combination of dataset A and B. Our experiments showed that Cross-Task Pre-training is a more promising approach to domain generalization.

Figures (1)

• Figure 1: The image in (a) was digitized with a 3DHISTECH PANNORAMIC 1000 scanner, (b) was extracted from an image acquired with a KFBIO KF-PRO-400 scanner, and (c) was obtained with a TEKSQRAY SQS-600P scanner. The test set had images acquired with another three unseen scanners.