Systematic Augmentation in HSV Space for Semantic Segmentation of Prostate Biopsies

Abstract:
In recent years, the combination of the digitization of the field of pathology and increased computational power has led to a big increase in research of computer-aided diagnostics using systems based on artificial intelligence (AI). This includes detection and classification of prostate cancer, where several studies have shown great promise in automated prostate cancer grading using deep learning based AI systems. However, there is still work to be done to ensure that these algorithms are invariant to possible variations of the digitized microscopy images they are applied to. A standard method in deep learning to increase the variation of the training data is dataset augmentation. All of these studies apply some augmentation of their data, however, there is a lack of evaluation of different methods and their impact on this crucial part of the AI systems. In this study, we look into different color augmentation methods for the task of segmentation of prostate biopsies. Furthermore, we introduce a novel color augmentation method based on stereographic projection. Our results affirm the importance of studying different augmentation methods and indicate a gain in performance using our method.