Enhancing glomeruli segmentation through cross-species pre-training

The importance of kidney biopsy, a medical procedure in which a small tissue sample is extracted from the kidney for examination, is increasing due to the rising incidence of kidney disorders. This procedure helps diagnosing several kidney diseases which are cause of kidney function changes, as well as guiding treatment decisions, and evaluating the suitability of potential donor kidneys for transplantation. In this work, a deep learning system for the automatic segmentation of glomeruli in biopsy kidney images is presented. A novel cross-species transfer learning approach, in which a semantic segmentation network is trained on mouse kidney tissue images and then fine-tuned on human data, is proposed to boost the segmentation performance. The experiments conducted using two deep semantic segmentation networks, MobileNet and SegNeXt, demonstrated the effectiveness of the cross-species pre-training approach leading to an increased generalization ability of both models.