# Deeply supervised UNet for semantic segmentation to assist dermatopathological assessment of Basal Cell Carcinoma (BCC)

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.03759 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03759/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [Attention U-Net: Learning Where to Look for the Pancreas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03999/) (2018)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05747/) (2017)
- [Image Segmentation Using Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.05566/) (2020)
- [Deeply-Supervised Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.5185/) (2014)
- [Deeply-Supervised CNN for Prostate Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07523/) (2017)
- [Deep Learning for Tumor Classification in Imaging Mass Spectrometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.01015/) (2017)
- [Deep Relevance Regularization: Interpretable and Robust Tumor Typing of Imaging Mass Spectrometry Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05459/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Language-guided Medical Image Segmentation with Target-informed Multi-level Contrastive Alignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13533/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate and fast assessment of resection margins is an essential part of a dermatopathologist's clinical routine. In this work, we successfully develop a deep learning method to assist the pathologists by marking critical regions that have a high probability of exhibiting pathological features in Whole Slide Images (WSI). We focus on detecting Basal Cell Carcinoma (BCC) through semantic segmentation using several models based on the UNet architecture. The study includes 650 WSI with 3443 tissue sections in total. Two clinical dermatopathologists annotated the data, marking tumor tissues' exact location on 100 WSI. The rest of the data, with ground-truth section-wise labels, is used to further validate and test the models. We analyze two different encoders for the first part of the UNet network and two additional training strategies: a) deep supervision, b) linear combination of decoder outputs, and obtain some interpretations about what the network's decoder does in each case. The best model achieves over 96%, accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity on the test set.