GeNSeg-Net: A General Segmentation Framework for Any Nucleus in Immunohistochemistry Images

Immunohistochemistry (IHC) plays a crucial role in understanding disease mechanisms, diagnosing pathology and guiding treatment decisions. The precise analysis heavily depends on accurate nucleus segmentation. However, segmentation is challenging due to significant inter- and intra-nucleus variability in morphology and distribution, stemming from inherent characteristics, imaging techniques, tissue differences and other factors. While current deep learning-based methods have shown promising results, their generalization performance is limited, inevitably requiring specific training data. To address the problem, we propose a novel Ge neral framework for Nucleus Seg mentation in IHC images (GeNSeg-Net). GeNSeg-Net effectively segments nuclei across diverse tissue types and imaging techniques with high variability using a small subset for training. It comprises an enhancement model and a segmentation model. Initially, all nuclei are enhanced to a uniform morphology with distinct features by the enhancement model through generation. The subsequent segmentation task is thereby simplified, leading to higher accuracy. We design a lightweight generator and discriminator to improve both enhancement quality and computational efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of each component within GeNSeg-Net. Compared to existing methods, GeNSeg-Net achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) segmentation accuracy and generalization performance on both private and public datasets, while maintaining highly competitive processing speed. Code is available at https://github.com/SikangSHU/GeNSeg-Net.