TCINet: Tissue-Conditioned Adaptive Cross-Branch Interaction Network for Nuclei Instance Segmentation

arXiv:2611.04235v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Separating touching nuclei requires local boundary detail, while cell type classification requires broader morphological context. These requirements also vary with the surrounding tissue environment. We propose the Tissue-Conditioned Adaptive Cross-Branch Interaction Network (TCINet), a single-stage model with Task-Specific Feature Adapters (TSFA) and Tissue-Conditioned Task-Aware Cross-Branch Interaction (TC-TACBI). TSFA produces branch-specific features at skip connections, and TC-TACBI controls three asymmetric paths among nucleus-presence (NP), horizontal-vertical (HV), and nucleus-type (NT) branches using predicted tissue probabilities. On PanNuke under standard three-fold cross-validation, TCINet achieves multiclass and binary panoptic quality scores of 0.519 and 0.692, respectively. Zero-shot tests on MoNuSeg yield a detection F1 score of 0.876. On PanNuke fold 0, adding TC-TACBI increases mPQ from 0.505 to 0.525. Code is available at https://github.com/celestial1321/TCINet.