A Quantitative Object-Level Metric for Segmentation Performance and Its Application to Cell Nuclei

We present an object-level metric for segmentation performance which was developed to quantify both over- and under-segmentation errors, as well as to penalize segmentations with larger deviations in object shape. This metric is applied to the problem of segmentation of cell nuclei in routinely stained H&E histopathology imagery. We show the correspondence between the metric terms and qualitative observations of segmentation quality, particularly the presence of over- and under-segmentation. The computation of this metric does not require the use of any point-to-point or region-to-region correspondences but rather simple computations using the object mask from both the segmentation and ground truth.