A novel automatic annotation method for whole slide pathological images combined clustering and edge detection technique

Abstract

Abstract Pixel‐level labeling of regions of interest in an image is a key step in building a labeled training dataset for supervised deep learning networks of images. However, traditional manual labeling of cancerous regions in digital pathological images by doctors is time‐consuming and inefficient. To address this issue, this paper proposes an automatic labeling method for whole slide images, which combines clustering and edge detection techniques. The proposed method utilizes the multi‐level feature fusion model and the Long‐Short Term Memory network to discriminate the cancerous nature of the whole slide images, thereby improving the classification accuracy of the whole slide images. Subsequently, the automatic labeling of cancerous regions is achieved by integrating a density‐based clustering algorithm and an edge point extraction algorithm, both based on the discriminated results of the cancerous properties of whole slide images. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which offers an efficient and accurate solution to the challenging task of cancerous region labeling in digital pathological images.

Keywords

• convolutional neural nets
• feature extraction
• image annotation
• medical image processing