Adaptive2Former: Enhancing Chromosome Instance Segmentation with Adaptive Query Decoder

Chromosome instance segmentation plays a crucial role in chromosomal karyotype analysis. However, the overlapping of chromosome instances and their individual morphological differences make accurate chromosome instance segmentation a challenging task. Especially in handling overlapping chromosome instances, traditional segmentation methods tend to confuse instances with one another. To solve these problems, this paper proposes an innovative method named Adaptive2Former. It builds upon our novel devised Adaptive Query Decoder (AQD) module to enhance segmentation precision. The AQD effectively utilizes the [cls] token from the backbone network to dynamically generate adaptive query vectors instead of using fixed queries. This new design leverages the semantic information inside the input images, producing representations more conducive to subsequent segmentation module, thereby improving the model’s segmentation performance. Experiments conducted on our dataset demonstrate that the proposed Adaptive2Former significantly enhances the performance of chromosome instance segmentation compared to Mask2Former and other existing models, achieving results of 97.65% mAP75 and 0.21 Dice Loss.