CUSS-Net: A Cascaded Unsupervised-Based Strategy and Supervised Network for Biomedical Image Diagnosis and Segmentation

Biomedical image segmentation and classification are critical components in a computer-aided diagnosis system. However, various deep convolutional neural networks are trained by a single task, ignoring the potential contribution of mutually performing multiple tasks. In this paper, we propose a cascaded unsupervised-based strategy to boost the supervised CNN framework for automated white blood cell (WBC) and skin lesion segmentation and classification, called CUSS-Net. Our proposed CUSS-Net consists of an unsupervised-based strategy (US) module, an enhanced segmentation network named E-SegNet, and a mask-guided classification network called MG-ClsNet. On the one hand, the proposed US module produces coarse masks that provide a prior localization map for the proposed E-SegNet to enhance it in locating and segmenting a target object accurately. On the other hand, the enhanced coarse masks predicted by the proposed E-SegNet are then fed into the proposed MG-ClsNet for accurate classification. Moreover, a novel cascaded dense inception module is presented to capture more high-level information. Meanwhile, we adopt a hybrid loss by combining a dice loss and a cross-entropy loss to alleviate the imbalance training problem. We evaluate our proposed CUSS-Net on three public medical image datasets. Experiments show that our proposed CUSS-Net outperforms representative state-of-the-art approaches.

Automated summary

In this paper, a cascaded unsupervised-based strategy (CUSS-Net) is proposed to improve the performance of the supervised CNN framework in white blood cell and skin lesion segmentation and classification. CUSS-Net consists of an unsupervised-based strategy (US) module, an enhanced segmentation network named E-SegNet, and a mask-guided classification network called MG-ClsNet. Experimental results show that CUSS-Net outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches.