TCINet: Tissue-Conditioned Adaptive Cross-Branch Interaction Network for Nuclei Instance Segmentation
Zhenghang Qian, Yang Liu, Yanzhi Yu, Peiwu Qin, Yibing Shen, Joongwon Chae, Lihui Luo, Zhongde Zhang, Jianwen Guo, Lianshun Jin
Abstract
Separating touching nuclei requires local boundary detail, while cell type classification requires broader morphological context. These requirements also vary with the surrounding tissue environment. We propose the Tissue-Conditioned Adaptive Cross-Branch Interaction Network (TCINet), a single-stage model with Task-Specific Feature Adapters (TSFA) and Tissue-Conditioned Task-Aware Cross-Branch Interaction (TC-TACBI). TSFA produces branch-specific features at skip connections, and TC-TACBI controls three asymmetric paths among nucleus-presence (NP), horizontal-vertical (HV), and nucleus-type (NT) branches using predicted tissue probabilities. On PanNuke under standard three-fold cross-validation, TCINet achieves multiclass and binary panoptic quality scores of 0.519 and 0.692, respectively. Zero-shot tests on MoNuSeg yield a detection F1 score of 0.876. On PanNuke fold 0, adding TC-TACBI increases mPQ from 0.505 to 0.525. Code is available at https://github.com/celestial1321/TCINet.