# Democratizing Pathological Image Segmentation with Lay Annotators via Molecular-empowered Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.00047 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00047/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [Dual-stream Multiple Instance Learning Network for Whole Slide Image Classification with Self-supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08939/) (2020)
- [Confident Learning: Estimating Uncertainty in Dataset Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00068/) (2019)
- [HoVer-Net: Simultaneous Segmentation and Classification of Nuclei in Multi-Tissue Histology Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06499/) (2018)
- [NuCLS: A scalable crowdsourcing, deep learning approach and dataset for nucleus classification, localization and segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09099/) (2021)
- [Pointly-Supervised Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13950/) (2022)
- [AirLab: Autograd Image Registration Laboratory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09907/) (2018)
- [Map3D: Registration Based Multi-Object Tracking on 3D Serial Whole Slide Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06038/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [PrPSeg: Universal Proposition Learning for Panoramic Renal Pathology Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19286/) (2024)
- [HATs: Hierarchical Adaptive Taxonomy Segmentation for Panoramic Pathology Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00596/) (2024)
- [Image Distillation for Safe Data Sharing in Histopathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13536/) (2024)
- [Leverage Weakly Annotation to Pixel-wise Annotation via Zero-shot Segment Anything Model for Molecular-empowered Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05785/) (2023)
- [Fine-grained Multi-class Nuclei Segmentation with Molecular-empowered All-in-SAM Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15751/) (2025)
- [DyMorph-B2I: Dynamic and Morphology-Guided Binary-to-Instance Segmentation for Renal Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15208/) (2025)
- [CASC-AI: Consensus-aware Self-corrective Learning for Noise Cell Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07302/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-class cell segmentation in high-resolution Giga-pixel whole slide images (WSI) is critical for various clinical applications. Training such an AI model typically requires labor-intensive pixel-wise manual annotation from experienced domain experts (e.g., pathologists). Moreover, such annotation is error-prone when differentiating fine-grained cell types (e.g., podocyte and mesangial cells) via the naked human eye. In this study, we assess the feasibility of democratizing pathological AI deployment by only using lay annotators (annotators without medical domain knowledge). The contribution of this paper is threefold: (1) We proposed a molecular-empowered learning scheme for multi-class cell segmentation using partial labels from lay annotators; (2) The proposed method integrated Giga-pixel level molecular-morphology cross-modality registration, molecular-informed annotation, and molecular-oriented segmentation model, so as to achieve significantly superior performance via 3 lay annotators as compared with 2 experienced pathologists; (3) A deep corrective learning (learning with imperfect label) method is proposed to further improve the segmentation performance using partially annotated noisy data. From the experimental results, our learning method achieved F1 = 0.8496 using molecular-informed annotations from lay annotators, which is better than conventional morphology-based annotations (F1 = 0.7015) from experienced pathologists. Our method democratizes the development of a pathological segmentation deep model to the lay annotator level, which consequently scales up the learning process similar to a non-medical computer vision task. The official implementation and cell annotations are publicly available at https://github.com/hrlblab/MolecularEL.