Mitosis detection in the wild using detection transformers

Abstract

BackgroundIdentification of mitotic cells and its down-stream analysis, is an important parameter in understanding the pathology of cancer, predicting response to chemotherapy and overall survival. However, their reliable detection remains challenging due to morphological overlap with other cellular structures, resulting in variability and high levels of false positives. Current artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms further face limitations when confronted with tissue heterogeneity and often underperform in non-tumor, inflamed, or necrotic regions. To address these challenges, Track 1 of MIDOG 2025 challenge expands the scope of mitotic figure detection to include all tissue regions, encompassing both hotspot and non-hotspot areas, thereby promoting real-world clinical applicability. MethodsWe propose a generalized deep learning based mitotic detection model (MD model) for robust and accurate detection of mitotic figures using the MIDOG-2025 challenge dataset. Our model enables robust and accurate detection of mitotic figures and demonstrates strong generalization to domain shifts arising from diverse histological regions, variations in scanners, tumor subtypes and laboratory protocols. ResultsOur approach showed a consistent performance with an F1-score of 0.7769 with a high recall of 0.8222. Our approach outperforms the baselines and generalizes well across the tumor types on the preliminary test set. ConclusionOur approach makes the final predictions with reduced false positives and improved detection accuracy. It generalizes well to address the domain shifts caused by diverse histological regions across the different tumor types among others.