# CGAM: Click-Guided Attention Module for Interactive Pathology Image Segmentation via Backpropagating Refinement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.01015 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01015/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jul 2023.

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

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Attention U-Net: Learning Where to Look for the Pancreas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03999/) (2018)
- [Deep Interactive Object Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.04042/) (2016)
- [Deep Extreme Cut: From Extreme Points to Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09081/) (2017)
- [f-BRS: Rethinking Backpropagating Refinement for Interactive Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.10331/) (2020)
- [AdaptIS: Adaptive Instance Selection Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07829/) (2019)
- [Generalizing Interactive Backpropagating Refinement for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10969/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [RP-SAM2: Refining Point Prompts for Stable Surgical Instrument Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07117/) (2025)
- [Evaluation and improvement of Segment Anything Model for interactive histopathology image segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10493/) (2023)
- [Clore: Interactive Pathology Image Segmentation with Click-based Local Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27625/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Tumor region segmentation is an essential task for the quantitative analysis of digital pathology. Recently presented deep neural networks have shown state-of-the-art performance in various image-segmentation tasks. However, because of the unclear boundary between the cancerous and normal regions in pathology images, despite using modern methods, it is difficult to produce satisfactory segmentation results in terms of the reliability and accuracy required for medical data. In this study, we propose an interactive segmentation method that allows users to refine the output of deep neural networks through click-type user interactions. The primary method is to formulate interactive segmentation as an optimization problem that leverages both user-provided click constraints and semantic information in a feature map using a click-guided attention module (CGAM). Unlike other existing methods, CGAM avoids excessive changes in segmentation results, which can lead to the overfitting of user clicks. Another advantage of CGAM is that the model size is independent of input image size. Experimental results on pathology image datasets indicated that our method performs better than existing state-of-the-art methods.