# Comparison of Different Methods for Tissue Segmentation in Histopathological Whole-Slide Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.05990 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05990/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Mar 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [A Comprehensive Review of Computer-aided Whole-slide Image Analysis: from Datasets to Feature Extraction, Segmentation, Classification, and Detection Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10553/) (2021)
- [Learning Whole-Slide Segmentation from Inexact and Incomplete Labels using Tissue Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03129/) (2021)
- [A State-of-the-art Survey of Artificial Neural Networks for Whole-slide Image Analysis:from Popular Convolutional Neural Networks to Potential Visual Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06243/) (2021)
- [The impact of tissue detection on diagnostic artificial intelligence algorithms in digital pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23021/) (2025)
- [AtlasPatch: Scalable Foundation Model-based Tissue Detection and Patch Extraction for Computational Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03998/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Tissue segmentation is an important pre-requisite for efficient and accurate diagnostics in digital pathology. However, it is well known that whole-slide scanners can fail in detecting all tissue regions, for example due to the tissue type, or due to weak staining because their tissue detection algorithms are not robust enough. In this paper, we introduce two different convolutional neural network architectures for whole slide image segmentation to accurately identify the tissue sections. We also compare the algorithms to a published traditional method. We collected 54 whole slide images with differing stains and tissue types from three laboratories to validate our algorithms. We show that while the two methods do not differ significantly they outperform their traditional counterpart (Jaccard index of 0.937 and 0.929 vs. 0.870, p < 0.01).