Abstract
Cell localization constitutes a fundamental research domain within the
realm of pathology image analysis, with its core objective being the
precise identification of cell spatial coordinates. The task has always
involved the challenge of large color variations among cells, uneven
distribution, and overlapping borders. Furthermore, in realistic cell
localization scenarios, the existing state-of-the-art methods suffer
from high computational costs and slow inference times, which severely
reduce the efficiency of computer-assisted. To tackle the above issues,
a lightweight and efficient cell localization model named Lite-UNet is
proposed. Specifically, the Lite-UNet encompasses three pivotal modules.
Firstly, we introduce a gradient aggregation module grounded in
difference convolution. This module effectively mitigates the challenge
posed by extensive color variations among cells by adeptly leveraging
gradient information. Secondly, we propose an efficient plug-and-play
graph correlation attention module, which optimizes the feature
representation capabilities by encoding higher-order feature
associations. Finally, we design a lightweight
Ghost\_CBAM module that alleviates the difficulty of
uneven cell distribution while forming the base module of the Lite-UNet.
Extensive experiments show that our Lite-UNet is capable of locating
cells in images quickly and accurately, thus further improving the
efficiency of computer-assisted medicine.