Goto

Collaborating Authors

 midog 2025


A Two-Stage Strategy for Mitosis Detection Using Improved YOLO11x Proposals and ConvNeXt Classification

Xiao, Jie, Lyu, Mengye, Liu, Shaojun

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

MIDOG 2025 Track 1 requires mitosis detection in whole-slideimages (WSIs) containing non-tumor, inflamed, and necrotic re-gions. Due to the complicated and heterogeneous context, aswell as possible artifacts, there are often false positives and falsenegatives, thus degrading the detection F1-score. To addressthis problem, we propose a two-stage framework. Firstly, an im-proved YOLO11x, integrated with EMA attention and LSConv,is employed to generate mitosis candidates. We use a low confi-dence threshold to generate as many proposals as possible, en-suring the detection recall. Then, a ConvNeXt-Tiny classifieris employed to filter out the false positives, ensuring the detec-tion precision. Consequently, the proposed two-stage frame-work can generate a high detection F1-score. Evaluated on afused dataset comprising MIDOG++, MITOS_WSI_CCMCT,and MITOS_WSI_CMC, our framework achieves an F1-scoreof 0.882, which is 0.035 higher than the single-stage YOLO11xbaseline. This performance gain is produced by a significantprecision improvement, from 0.762 to 0.839, and a comparablerecall. On the MIDOG 2025 Track 1 preliminary test set, thealgorithm scores an F1 score of 0.7587. The code is available athttps://github.com/xxiao0304/MIDOG-2025-Track-1-of-SZTU.


MIDOG 2025: Mitotic Figure Detection with Attention-Guided False Positive Correction

Broad, Andrew, Keighley, Jason, Godson, Lucy, Wright, Alex

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We present a novel approach which extends the existing Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detector (FCOS) for mitotic figure detection. Our composite model adds a Feedback Attention Ladder CNN (FAL-CNN) model for classification of normal versus abnormal mitotic figures, feeding into a fusion network that is trained to generate adjustments to bounding boxes predicted by FCOS. Our network aims to reduce the false positive rate of the FCOS object detector, to improve the accuracy of object detection and enhance the generalisability of the network. Our model achieved an F1 score of 0.655 for mitosis detection on the preliminary evaluation dataset.


Ensemble of Pathology Foundation Models for MIDOG 2025 Track 2: Atypical Mitosis Classification

Ochi, Mieko, Yuan, Bae

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Hematoxylin and eosin-stained mitotic figure (MF) counts are essential for tumor evaluation, serving both as stan-dalone and component grades in malignancy assessment (1). Mitotic figures are broadly classified into typical and atypical variants, with atypical forms--characterized by dysregulated chromatin aggregation and reflecting ge-nomic instabilities such as chromosomal instability and aneuploidy--demonstrating independent prognostic value in cancers like breast carcinoma (2, 3). However, manual enumeration and discrimination of MF variants are time-consuming and subject to substantial inter-observer variability. To address these challenges, we present a two-stage framework for automated MF classification in the MIDOG2025 Track 2 challenge (4). First, we performed parameter-efficient fine-tuning of multiple Pathology Foundation Models (PFMs) using low-rank adaptation (LoRA) (5). Training incorporated fisheye augmentation to emphasize central mi-toses (6) and Fourier Domain Adaptation (FDA) for unsupervised style transfer with ImageNet images (7). We further enhanced domain generalization by augmenting the MI-DOG2025 set with an external labeled MF dataset (8). Second, we ensembled the adapted PFMs and ConvNeXt V2 (9) to integrate complementary morphological insights into a unified classification decision (10). Our method achieved a high balanced accuracy on validation splits and also demonstrated strong performance on the Preliminary Evaluation Phase dataset, underscoring its potential for reliable, automated MF analysis.


Teacher-Student Model for Detecting and Classifying Mitosis in the MIDOG 2025 Challenge

Choe, Seungho, Qin, Xiaoli, Shafique, Abubakr, Dy, Amanda, Done, Susan, Androutsos, Dimitrios, Khademi, April

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Counting mitotic figures is time-intensive for pathologists and leads to inter-observer variability. Artificial intelligence (AI) promises a solution by automatically detecting mitotic figures while maintaining decision consistency. However, AI tools are susceptible to domain shift, where a significant drop in performance can occur due to differences in the training and testing sets, including morphological diversity between organs, species, and variations in staining protocols. Furthermore, the number of mitoses is much less than the count of normal nuclei, which introduces severely imbalanced data for the detection task. In this work, we formulate mitosis detection as a pixel-level segmentation and propose a teacher-student model that simultaneously addresses mitosis detection (Track 1) and atypical mitosis classification (Track 2). Our method is based on a UNet segmentation backbone that integrates domain generalization modules, namely contrastive representation learning and domain-adversarial training. A teacher-student strategy is employed to generate pixel-level pseudo-masks not only for annotated mitoses and hard negatives but also for normal nuclei, thereby enhancing feature discrimination and improving robustness against domain shift. For the classification task, we introduce a multi-scale CNN classifier that leverages feature maps from the segmentation model within a multi-task learning paradigm. On the preliminary test set, the algorithm achieved an F1 score of 0.7660 in Track 1 and balanced accuracy of 0.8414 in Track 2, demonstrating the effectiveness of integrating segmentation-based detection and classification into a unified framework for robust mitosis analysis.


MitoDetect++: A Domain-Robust Pipeline for Mitosis Detection and Atypical Subtyping

Nasir, Esha Sadia, Lv, Jiaqi, Jahanifar, Mostafa, Raza, Shan E Ahmed

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Automated detection and classification of mitotic figures especially distinguishing atypical from normal remain critical challenges in computational pathology. We present MitoDetect++, a unified deep learning pipeline designed for the MIDOG 2025 challenge, addressing both mitosis detection and atypical mitosis classification. For detection (Track 1), we employ a U-Net-based encoder-decoder architecture with EfficientNetV2-L as the backbone, enhanced with attention modules, and trained via combined segmentation losses. For classification (Track 2), we leverage the Virchow2 vision transformer, fine-tuned efficiently using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to minimize resource consumption. To improve generalization and mitigate domain shifts, we integrate strong augmentations, focal loss, and group-aware stratified 5-fold cross-validation. At inference, we deploy test-time augmentation (TTA) to boost robustness. Our method achieves a balanced accuracy of 0.892 across validation domains, highlighting its clinical applicability and scalability across tasks.


Is Synthetic Image Augmentation Useful for Imbalanced Classification Problems? Case-Study on the MIDOG2025 Atypical Cell Detection Competition

Benito-Del-Valle, Leire, Moreno-Sánchez, Pedro A., Egusquiza, Itziar, Vitoria, Itsaso, Picón, Artzai, López-Saratxaga, Cristina, Galdran, Adrian

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The MIDOG 2025 challenge extends prior work on mitotic figure detection by introducing a new Track 2 on atypical mitosis classification. This task aims to distinguish normal from atypical mitotic figures in histopathology images, a clinically relevant but highly imbalanced and cross-domain problem. We investigated two complementary backbones: (i) ConvNeXt-Small, pretrained on ImageNet, and (ii) a histopathology-specific ViT from Lunit trained via self-supervision. To address the strong prevalence imbalance (9408 normal vs. 1741 atypical), we synthesized additional atypical examples to approximate class balance and compared models trained with real-only vs. real+synthetic data. Using five-fold cross-validation, both backbones reached strong performance (mean AUROC approximately 95 percent), with ConvNeXt achieving slightly higher peaks while Lunit exhibited greater fold-to-fold stability. Synthetic balancing, however, did not lead to consistent improvements. On the organizers' preliminary hidden test set, explicitly designed as an out-of-distribution debug subset, ConvNeXt attained the highest AUROC (95.4 percent), whereas Lunit remained competitive on balanced accuracy. These findings suggest that both ImageNet and domain-pretrained backbones are viable for atypical mitosis classification, with domain-pretraining conferring robustness and ImageNet pretraining reaching higher peaks, while naive synthetic balancing has limited benefit. Full hidden test set results will be reported upon challenge completion.


Normal and Atypical Mitosis Image Classifier using Efficient Vision Transformer

Qi, Xuan, Labella, Dominic, Sanford, Thomas, Lee, Maxwell

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We tackle atypical versus normal mitosis classification in the MIDOG 2025 challenge using EfficientViT-L2, a hybrid CNN--ViT architecture optimized for accuracy and efficiency. A unified dataset of 13,938 nuclei from seven cancer types (MIDOG++ and AMi-Br) was used, with atypical mitoses comprising ~15. To assess domain generalization, we applied leave-one-cancer-type-out cross-validation with 5-fold ensembles, using stain-deconvolution for image augmentation. For challenge submissions, we trained an ensemble with the same 5-fold split but on all cancer types. In the preliminary evaluation phase, this model achieved balanced accuracy of 0.859, ROC AUC of 0.942, and raw accuracy of 0.85, demonstrating competitive and well-balanced performance across metrics.


A bag of tricks for real-time Mitotic Figure detection

Marzahl, Christian, Napora, Brian

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Mitotic figure (MF) detection in histopathology images is challenging due to large variations in slide scanners, staining protocols, tissue types, and the presence of artifacts. This paper presents a collection of training techniques - a bag of tricks - that enable robust, real-time MF detection across diverse domains. We build on the efficient RTMDet single stage object detector to achieve high inference speed suitable for clinical deployment. Our method addresses scanner variability and tumor heterogeneity via extensive multi-domain training data, balanced sampling, and careful augmentation. Additionally, we employ targeted, hard negative mining on necrotic and debris tissue to reduce false positives. In a grouped 5-fold cross-validation across multiple MF datasets, our model achieves an F1 score between 0.78 and 0.84. On the preliminary test set of the MItosis DOmain Generalization (MIDOG) 2025 challenge, our single-stage RTMDet-S based approach reaches an F1 of 0.81, outperforming larger models and demonstrating adaptability to new, unfamiliar domains. The proposed solution offers a practical trade-off between accuracy and speed, making it attractive for real-world clinical adoption.