# GRU-Net: Gaussian Attention Aided Dense Skip Connection Based MultiResUNet for Breast Histopathology Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.08604 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08604/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [Attention U-Net: Learning Where to Look for the Pancreas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03999/) (2018)
- [Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.7062/) (2014)
- [ResUNet-a: a deep learning framework for semantic segmentation of remotely sensed data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00592/) (2019)
- [A survey of loss functions for semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14822/) (2020)
- [MultiResUNet : Rethinking the U-Net Architecture for Multimodal Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.04049/) (2019)
- [HistoSeg : Quick attention with multi-loss function for multi-structure segmentation in digital histology images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00729/) (2022)
- [SPPNet: A Single-Point Prompt Network for Nuclei Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12231/) (2023)
- [CellTranspose: Few-shot Domain Adaptation for Cellular Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14121/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Is Exchangeability better than I.I.D to handle Data Distribution Shifts while Pooling Data for Data-scarce Medical image segmentation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19575/) (2025)
- [Leveraging pretrained RGB denoisers for hyperspectral image restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24769/) (2026)
- [TUMLS: Trustful Fully Unsupervised Multi-Level Segmentation for Whole Slide Images of Histology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12718/) (2025)
- [Prompt-Free Lightweight SAM Adaptation for Histopathology Nuclei Segmentation with Strong Cross-Dataset Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20326/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Breast cancer is a major global health concern. Pathologists face challenges in analyzing complex features from pathological images, which is a time-consuming and labor-intensive task. Therefore, efficient computer-based diagnostic tools are needed for early detection and treatment planning. This paper presents a modified version of MultiResU-Net for histopathology image segmentation, which is selected as the backbone for its ability to analyze and segment complex features at multiple scales and ensure effective feature flow via skip connections. The modified version also utilizes the Gaussian distribution-based Attention Module (GdAM) to incorporate histopathology-relevant text information in a Gaussian distribution. The sampled features from the Gaussian text feature-guided distribution highlight specific spatial regions based on prior knowledge. Finally, using the Controlled Dense Residual Block (CDRB) on skip connections of MultiResU-Net, the information is transferred from the encoder layers to the decoder layers in a controlled manner using a scaling parameter derived from the extracted spatial features. We validate our approach on two diverse breast cancer histopathology image datasets: TNBC and MonuSeg, demonstrating superior segmentation performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. The code for our proposed model is available on https://github.com/AyushRoy2001/GRU-Net.