A lightweight network based on dual-stream feature fusion and dual-domain attention for white blood cells segmentation

INTRODUCTION: Accurate white blood cells segmentation from cytopathological images is crucial for evaluating leukemia. However, segmentation is difficult in clinical practice. Given the very large numbers of cytopathological images to be processed, diagnosis becomes cumbersome and time consuming, and diagnostic accuracy is also closely related to experts' experience, fatigue and mood and so on. Besides, fully automatic white blood cells segmentation is challenging for several reasons. There exists cell deformation, blurred cell boundaries, and cell color differences, cells overlapping or adhesion. METHODS: The proposed method improves the feature representation capability of the network while reducing parameters and computational redundancy by utilizing the feature reuse of Ghost module to reconstruct a lightweight backbone network. Additionally, a dual-stream feature fusion network (DFFN) based on the feature pyramid network is designed to enhance detailed information acquisition. Furthermore, a dual-domain attention module (DDAM) is developed to extract global features from both frequency and spatial domains simultaneously, resulting in better cell segmentation performance. RESULTS: Experimental results on ALL-IDB and BCCD datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing instance segmentation networks such as Mask R-CNN, PointRend, MS R-CNN, SOLOv2, and YOLACT with an average precision (AP) of 87.41%, while significantly reducing parameters and computational cost. DISCUSSION: Our method is significantly better than the current state-of-the-art single-stage methods in terms of both the number of parameters and FLOPs, and our method has the best performance among all compared methods. However, the performance of our method is still lower than the two-stage instance segmentation algorithms. in future work, how to design a more lightweight network model while ensuring a good accuracy will become an important problem.