Search arXiv⌕ Search

arXiv · 2609.38419

Colorectal Cancer Segmentation with Adaptive Augmentation and Multi-Resolution Ensemble Models

Abstract

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the second most deadly and third most common cancer, and the leading cause of death among gastrointestinal cancers. Early diagnosis is crucial for the treatment of this cancer and increasing the survival rates. Although CRC is more common in developed regions, its occurrence is also increasing in developing regions as well. CRC diagnosis relies on histopathology assessment post-biopsy. Automated deep learning algorithms can significantly reduce diagnosis time, enhancing efficiency and supporting timely clinical decisions. We present an automated segmentation pipeline for whole-slide histopathology images that labels tumor grades 1-3 and normal mucosa. It utilizes dense prediction transformers with various encoder backbones, overlapping patches, and test-time augmentation. An adaptive augmentation policy, guided by large language models, further improves training. Top models were ensembled via soft voting, and mask refining post-processing steps, Gaussian blurring, morphological closing, and connected components analysis. On a colorectal cancer grade dataset, our method improved the F1 score from 62.92 to 69.84. Code is available here: github.com/caglarmert/ICIP2025

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Ümit Mert Çağlar, Alptekin Temizel. 2026-09-29. Colorectal Cancer Segmentation with Adaptive Augmentation and Multi-Resolution Ensemble Models. https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3096537

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

A Simple yet Effective Framework for Pre-treatment and Post-treatment Glioma Segmentation Using Multimodal MRI

Accurate glioma segmentation across pre- and post-treatment MRI remains challenging because treatment alters both image appearance and the target regions. In particular, the resection cavity (RC) is defined only for post-treatment cases, complicating joint learning from pooled data. We present RC-aware nnU-Netv2, a simple yet effective glioma segmentation framework that combines lesion- and boundary-aware single-cohort training, an RC-aware joint learning objective, and treatment-status-guided model routing at inference. During pooled training, the joint objective applies both standard and boundary-weighted binary cross-entropy to all four region channels, while employing Dice supervision for channels with non-empty targets and a controlled false-positive penalty for channels with empty targets across the mini-batch. This design explicitly accommodates the absence of RC in pre-treatment cases. Our approach uses only the standard nnU-Netv2 data augmentation and a single specialized model per case, without additional synthetic tumor generation or multi-model ensembling. RC-aware nnU-Netv2 ranked second in the BraTS 2025 Lighthouse Challenge Task 1 (BraTS-GLI 2025), with segmentation performance comparable to that of the first-place method, which relied on on-the-fly GliGAN-based synthetic tumor augmentation and multi-model ensembling. On the official blind test set, our method achieved mean lesion-wise Dice scores of 0.7878, 0.8709, 0.7923, and 0.8715 and mean NSD@1.0 scores of 0.8309, 0.8712, 0.7980, and 0.8336 for enhancing tumor, RC, tumor core, and whole tumor, respectively. In paired post-treatment analysis, the RC-aware joint model improved mean lesion-wise Dice by 0.042 (95% CI: [0.028, 0.057]) and mean NSD@1.0 by 0.043 (95% CI: [0.028, 0.059]) compared with the joint baseline.

eess.IV↗

Deficit-Driven Stratified Acquisition for Building STRATA-S12: An Open SAR-Optical Corpus for Self-Supervised Learning

Building a co-registered SAR-optical corpus for self-supervised Earth Observation is above all an acquisition problem, yet the main multi-modal datasets are collected opportunistically, with no per-stratum quota control, so the regions and seasons that cloud cover hits hardest end up under-sampled. We present Deficit-Driven Stratified Acquisition (DDSA), an algorithm that casts the construction of a Sentinel-1/Sentinel-2 corpus as a constrained maximum-coverage problem over a land-cover-driven, hemisphere-corrected (class x season x region) stratification of target countries on all six inhabited continents, and solves it online: acquisition is ordered by marginal gain against a per-stratum deficit that the quality gates and a visual review of every accepted pair keep updating during the run. Three results follow from measuring the algorithm on its own product. First, stratum balance is a property of the deficit-driven ordering rather than of run length: replayed over all 2,928,370 real acquisition attempts, failures included, it populates all 192 strata within 0.05% of the attempts, against 4.03% for uniform round-robin effort and 20.5% for a random order. Second, whether a rejected attempt can be recovered is better predicted by how long its cause persists than by the type of defect: cloud rejections are recovered at eta = 18.8% against 41.4% for nodata, consistent with clouds persisting through a season. Third, the repair loop supplies 39.5% of the released pairs at no measurable quality cost, with 89.8% surviving manual review, but it adds yield rather than balance. The quality guarantee has a price: 2,928,370 acquisition attempts produced 740,746 released pairs. We release the corpus, STRATA-S12, with per-pair metadata sidecars aligned with the STAC and PDS4 standards and the FAIR principles, and a pre-registered linear probe confirms it is fit for self-supervised pre-training.

eess.IV↗

CoRE: Relating Fine-Grained Chest X-ray Findings in Anatomical Context

Chest X-ray interpretation depends on both the anatomical location of findings and their relationships with other abnormalities. However, relations defined over global finding labels do not explicitly distinguish the same finding across anatomical locations. We propose CoRE(Co-occurrence-guided Region Evidence), a framework that incorporates relationships among findings and anatomical context into fine-grained chest X-ray prediction. It groups anatomical region-finding labels by co-occurrence and uses these groups to guide shared representation learning through visual prompt tuning on a frozen vision transformer. The predictions are supplemented by an anatomically supervised region-evidence stream through region-matched logit residuals. Experiments on MIMIC-CXR with Chest ImaGenome annotations show that CoRE improves region-finding classification over standard and relation-aware prompt-based baselines. Quantitative evaluations on MS-CXR and the Chest ImaGenome gold standard show improved finding localization, supported by qualitative comparisons. CoRE also improves finding-level classification on mapped finding labels in external VinDr-CXR and CheXpert datasets without target-domain adaptation. These results demonstrate the value of jointly modeling finding relationships and anatomical context for fine-grained chest X-ray analysis.

eess.IV↗