Detection-Guided ROI-Constrained Diffusion for Weakly Supervised White Blood Cell Segmentation: A Retrospective Internal and External Dataset Evaluation
Background: Accurate white blood cell (WBC) segmentation is important for quantitative microscopic image analysis, but conventional supervised approaches depend on labor-intensive pixel-level annotations and may exhibit reduced robustness across datasets. This study proposes a detector-guided, region of interest (ROI)-constrained framework that combines automatic localization, pseudo-mask-based weak supervision, and diffusion-assisted segmentation. Methods: You Only Look Once version 13 Nano (YOLOv13-N) was used to localize WBCs and define ROIs, within which segmentation was performed using the proposed diffusion-assisted model. Automatically generated pseudo-masks served as segmentation-training targets, while expert masks were retained for reference evaluation. Experiments used a verified Dicle cohort of 14,721 records, partitioned into 10,305 training, 2208 validation, and 2208 held-out test records. Performance was evaluated separately at ROI-conditional and end-to-end levels. Generalization was assessed on 11,200 Raabin-WBC records using the frozen framework without external tuning. Results: The automatically generated pseudo-masks achieved a mean Dice score of approximately 0.702, demonstrating usable but imperfect weak supervision. On the held-out Dicle test set, the proposed framework achieved a Dice score of 0.7188, intersection over union (IoU) of 0.5796, precision of 0.8966, and recall of 0.6422 under ROI-conditional evaluation. End-to-end performance was 0.6705 Dice, 0.5408 IoU, 0.8378 precision, and 0.5986 recall, demonstrating the influence of localization on overall performance. Comparison with reference segmentation architectures showed that the proposed framework did not maximize internal Dice, while achieving the highest reported ROI-conditional precision. Frozen external evaluation on Raabin-WBC revealed further degradation under dataset shift, with failure analysis identifying detector/ROI transfer as an important end-to-end bottleneck. Conclusions: The proposed framework demonstrates the feasibility of WBC segmentation using detector-guided ROI processing and pseudo-mask-based weak supervision, reducing reliance on expert pixel-level segmentation targets. The findings further show that robust cross-dataset localization is critical to end-to-end generalization and provide a clear direction for improving weakly supervised WBC segmentation across heterogeneous microscopy datasets.