TiLCA-Net: nuclei segmentation and classification in pathological images via task-specialized attention and efficient decoding.

BACKGROUND

Nuclei segmentation and classification in whole-slide images (WSIs) are critical for tumor diagnosis and treatment. Existing methods often face multi-task feature conflict and computational redundancy. This study aimed to develop an efficient multi-task framework that balances segmentation accuracy and inference efficiency.

METHODS

To seek an improved balance between segmentation accuracy and efficiency, this study proposes TiLCA-Net, a network that integrates multi-scale attention mechanisms with a lightweight decoding strategy to optimize comprehensive model performance. First, a Task-Specialized Attention Integrated Encoder (TSEncoder) is designed to decouple features by assigning spatial, global, and channel attention at multiple levels, thereby mitigating negative transfer. Second, we introduce an iterative cross-enhancement (ICE) module, which utilizes closed-loop iteration and median pooling to enhance global geometric consistency and robustness. Finally, a Lightweight Context Aggregation Decoder (LCA-Decoder) is introduced, replacing redundant structures with multi-scale aggregation to substantially reduce computational cost while preserving high-frequency details.

RESULTS

Experiments on CoNSeP, MoNuSeg, and CervCell-Seg demonstrate that TiLCA-Net achieves a favorable balance between segmentation performance and computational efficiency. TiLCA-Net achieved mean panoptic quality (PQ) scores of 0.528, 0.578, and 0.592 on CoNSeP, MoNuSeg, and CervCell-Seg, respectively, compared with 0.504, 0.563, and 0.578 for HoVer-Net. These results indicate PQ improvements of 0.024, 0.015, and 0.014 on the three datasets, respectively. Patch-level benchmarking showed that TiLCA-Net required fewer floating point operations per second (FLOPs) and achieved higher batch throughput than HoVer-Net, but with higher single-patch latency and peak graphics processing unit (GPU) memory.

CONCLUSIONS

Through feature decoupling and efficient decoder reconstruction, TiLCA-Net provides a practical accuracy-efficiency trade-off for patch-level nuclei analysis in computational pathology.