CoNIC Challenge: Pushing the Frontiers of Nuclear Detection, Segmentation, Classification and Counting

Nuclear detection, segmentation and morphometric profiling are essential in helping us further understand the relationship between histology and patient outcome. To drive innovation in this area, we setup a community-wide challenge using the largest available dataset of its kind to assess nuclear segmentation and cellular composition. Our challenge, named CoNIC, stimulated the development of reproducible algorithms for cellular recognition with real-time result inspection on public leaderboards. We conducted an extensive post-challenge analysis based on the top-performing models using 1,658 whole-slide images of colon tissue. With around 700 million detected nuclei per model, associated features were used for dysplasia grading and survival analysis, where we demonstrated that the challenge's improvement over the previous state-of-the-art led to significant boosts in downstream performance. Our findings also suggest that eosinophils and neutrophils play an important role in the tumour microevironment. We release challenge models and WSI-level results to foster the development of further methods for biomarker discovery.

MF-Hovernet: An Extension of Hovernet for Colon Nuclei Identification and Counting (CoNiC) Challenge

Nuclei Identification and Counting is the most important morphological feature of cancers, especially in the colon. Many deep learning-based methods have been proposed to deal with this problem. In this work, we construct an extension of Hovernet for nuclei identification and counting to address the problem named MF-Hovernet. Our proposed model is the combination of multiple filer block to Hovernet architecture. The current result shows the efficiency of multiple filter block to improve the performance of the original Hovernet model.