Semi-Supervised Pixel Contrastive Learning Framework for Tissue Segmentation in Histopathological Image

Accurate tissue segmentation in histopathological images is essential for promoting the development of precision pathology. However, the size of the digital pathological image is great, which needs to be tiled into small patches containing limited semantic information. To imitate the pathologist's diagnosis process and model the semantic relation of the whole slide image, We propose a semi-supervised pixel contrastive learning framework (SSPCL) which mainly includes an uncertainty-guided mutual dual consistency learning module (UMDC) and a cross image pixel-contrastive learning module (CIPC). The UMDC module enables efficient learning from unlabeled data through mutual dual-consistency and consensus-based uncertainty. The CIPC module aims at capturing the cross-patch semantic relationship by optimizing a contrastive loss between pixel embeddings. We also propose several novel domain-related sampling methods by utilizing the continuous spatial structure of adjacent image patches, which can avoid the problem of false sampling and improve the training efficiency. In this way, SSPCL significantly reduces the labeling cost on histopathological images and realizes the accurate quantitation of tissues. Extensive experiments on three tissue segmentation datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SSPCL, which outperforms state-of-the-art up to 5.0% in mDice.