M²CF-Net: A Multi-Resolution and Multi-Scale Cross Fusion Network for Segmenting Pathology Lesion of the Focal Lymphocytic Sialadenitis

In the medical realm, the pivotal role of pathological Whole Slide Images (WSIs) in detecting cancer, tracking disease progression, and evaluating treatment efficacy is indisputable. Nevertheless, the identification and quantification of lesion areas in these gigapixel WSIs present a significant challenge due to their substantial size and the intricate details of lesions. To address these issues, we developed a novel multi-resolution and multi-scale cross fusion network (M ² CF-Net), adept at managing large-scale pathological WSIs and capturing both fine details and context. Our model particularly focuses on segmenting local lymphocyte infiltration lesions in pathological WSIs of patients diagnosed with primary Sjogren's syndrome. By employing a patch-based training approach and combining interconnected elements via a multi-scale fusion technique, we enhance our model's capacity to detect and analyze structures and features in minor salivary gland section WSIs. Extensive experiments and ablation studies conducted on real-world clinical datasets affirm our model's superior accuracy in identifying lymphocyte-infiltrated regions over state-of-the-art models, with a performance improvement of up to 4.32% in terms of the Dice Similarity Coefficient.