CoNIC Challenge: Pushing the Frontiers of Nuclear Detection, Segmentation, Classification and Counting

11 Mar 2023 · Simon Graham, Quoc Dang Vu, Mostafa Jahanifar, Martin Weigert, Uwe Schmidt, Wenhua Zhang, Jun Zhang, Sen yang, Jinxi Xiang, Xiyue Wang, Josef Lorenz Rumberger, Elias Baumann, Peter Hirsch, Lihao Liu, Chenyang Hong, Angelica I. Aviles-Rivero, Ayushi Jain, Heeyoung Ahn, Yiyu Hong, Hussam Azzuni, Min Xu, Mohammad Yaqub, Marie-Claire Blache, Benoît Piégu, Bertrand Vernay, Tim Scherr, Moritz Böhland, Katharina Löffler, Jiachen Li, Weiqin Ying, Chixin Wang, Dagmar Kainmueller, Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb, Shuolin Liu, Dhairya Talsania, Yughender Meda, Prakash Mishra, Muhammad Ridzuan, Oliver Neumann, Marcel P. Schilling, Markus Reischl, Ralf Mikut, Banban Huang, Hsiang-Chin Chien, Ching-Ping Wang, Chia-Yen Lee, Hong-Kun Lin, Zaiyi Liu, Xipeng Pan, Chu Han, Jijun Cheng, Muhammad Dawood, Srijay Deshpande, Raja Muhammad Saad Bashir, Adam Shephard, Pedro Costa, João D. Nunes, Aurélio Campilho, Jaime S. Cardoso, Hrishikesh P S, Densen Puthussery, Devika R G, Jiji C V, Ye Zhang, Zijie Fang, Zhifan Lin, Yongbing Zhang, Chunhui Lin, Liukun Zhang, Lijian Mao, Min Wu, Vi Thi-Tuong Vo, Soo-Hyung Kim, Taebum Lee, Satoshi Kondo, Satoshi Kasai, Pranay Dumbhare, Vedant Phuse, Yash Dubey, Ankush Jamthikar, Trinh Thi Le Vuong, Jin Tae Kwak, Dorsa Ziaei, Hyun Jung, Tianyi Miao, David Snead, Shan E Ahmed Raza, Fayyaz Minhas, Nasir M. Rajpoot ·

Nuclear detection, segmentation and morphometric profiling are essential in helping us further understand the relationship between histology and patient outcome. To drive innovation in this area, we setup a community-wide challenge using the largest available dataset of its kind to assess nuclear segmentation and cellular composition. Our challenge, named CoNIC, stimulated the development of reproducible algorithms for cellular recognition with real-time result inspection on public leaderboards. We conducted an extensive post-challenge analysis based on the top-performing models using 1,658 whole-slide images of colon tissue. With around 700 million detected nuclei per model, associated features were used for dysplasia grading and survival analysis, where we demonstrated that the challenge's improvement over the previous state-of-the-art led to significant boosts in downstream performance. Our findings also suggest that eosinophils and neutrophils play an important role in the tumour microevironment. We release challenge models and WSI-level results to foster the development of further methods for biomarker discovery.

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