Enhanced boundary-directed lightweight approach for digital pathological image analysis in critical oncological diagnostics

Background Pathological images play a crucial role in the diagnosis of critically ill cancer patients. Since cancer patients often seek medical assistance when their condition is severe, doctors face the urgent challenge of completing accurate diagnoses and developing surgical plans within a limited timeframe. The complexity and diversity of pathological images require a significant investment of time from specialized physicians for processing and analysis, which can lead to missing the optimal treatment window. Purpose Current medical decision support systems are challenged by the high computational complexity of deep learning models, which demand extensive data training, making it difficult to meet the real-time needs of emergency diagnostics. Method This study addresses the issue of emergency diagnosis for malignant bone tumors such as osteosarcoma by proposing a Lightened Boundary-enhanced Digital Pathological Image Recognition Strategy (LB-DPRS). This strategy optimizes the self-attention mechanism of the Transformer model and innovatively implements a boundary segmentation enhancement strategy, thereby improving the recognition accuracy of tissue backgrounds and nuclear boundaries. Additionally, this research introduces row-column attention methods to sparsify the attention matrix, reducing the computational burden of the model and enhancing recognition speed. Furthermore, the proposed complementary attention mechanism further assists convolutional layers in fully extracting detailed features from pathological images . Results The DSC value of LB-DPRS strategy reached 0.862, the IOU value reached 0.749, and the params was only 10.97 M. Conclusion Experimental results demonstrate that the LB-DPRS strategy significantly improves computational efficiency while maintaining prediction accuracy and enhancing model interpretability, providing powerful and efficient support for the emergency diagnosis of malignant bone tumors such as osteosarcoma.