PathoPainter: Augmenting Histopathology Segmentation via Tumor-aware Inpainting

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Liu, Hong, Yang, Haosen, Huijben, Evi M. C., Schuiveling, Mark, Su, Ruisheng, Pluim, Josien P. W., Veta, Mitko
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915184399876096
author Liu, Hong
Yang, Haosen
Huijben, Evi M. C.
Schuiveling, Mark
Su, Ruisheng
Pluim, Josien P. W.
Veta, Mitko
author_facet Liu, Hong
Yang, Haosen
Huijben, Evi M. C.
Schuiveling, Mark
Su, Ruisheng
Pluim, Josien P. W.
Veta, Mitko
contents Tumor segmentation plays a critical role in histopathology, but it requires costly, fine-grained image-mask pairs annotated by pathologists. Thus, synthesizing histopathology data to expand the dataset is highly desirable. Previous works suffer from inaccuracies and limited diversity in image-mask pairs, both of which affect training segmentation, particularly in small-scale datasets and the inherently complex nature of histopathology images. To address this challenge, we propose PathoPainter, which reformulates image-mask pair generation as a tumor inpainting task. Specifically, our approach preserves the background while inpainting the tumor region, ensuring precise alignment between the generated image and its corresponding mask. To enhance dataset diversity while maintaining biological plausibility, we incorporate a sampling mechanism that conditions tumor inpainting on regional embeddings from a different image. Additionally, we introduce a filtering strategy to exclude uncertain synthetic regions, further improving the quality of the generated data. Our comprehensive evaluation spans multiple datasets featuring diverse tumor types and various training data scales. As a result, segmentation improved significantly with our synthetic data, surpassing existing segmentation data synthesis approaches, e.g., 75.69% -> 77.69% on CAMELYON16. The code is available at https://github.com/HongLiuuuuu/PathoPainter.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_04634
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PathoPainter: Augmenting Histopathology Segmentation via Tumor-aware Inpainting
Liu, Hong
Yang, Haosen
Huijben, Evi M. C.
Schuiveling, Mark
Su, Ruisheng
Pluim, Josien P. W.
Veta, Mitko
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Tumor segmentation plays a critical role in histopathology, but it requires costly, fine-grained image-mask pairs annotated by pathologists. Thus, synthesizing histopathology data to expand the dataset is highly desirable. Previous works suffer from inaccuracies and limited diversity in image-mask pairs, both of which affect training segmentation, particularly in small-scale datasets and the inherently complex nature of histopathology images. To address this challenge, we propose PathoPainter, which reformulates image-mask pair generation as a tumor inpainting task. Specifically, our approach preserves the background while inpainting the tumor region, ensuring precise alignment between the generated image and its corresponding mask. To enhance dataset diversity while maintaining biological plausibility, we incorporate a sampling mechanism that conditions tumor inpainting on regional embeddings from a different image. Additionally, we introduce a filtering strategy to exclude uncertain synthetic regions, further improving the quality of the generated data. Our comprehensive evaluation spans multiple datasets featuring diverse tumor types and various training data scales. As a result, segmentation improved significantly with our synthetic data, surpassing existing segmentation data synthesis approaches, e.g., 75.69% -> 77.69% on CAMELYON16. The code is available at https://github.com/HongLiuuuuu/PathoPainter.
title PathoPainter: Augmenting Histopathology Segmentation via Tumor-aware Inpainting
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04634