Mitosis Detection in H&E

Problem: One of the hallmarks of cancer is rapidly dividing cells. Histopathology can catch a snapshot in time, with the stages of cell division (mitosis) visible. Pathologists count mitotic figures to assess the aggressiveness of a tumor.

Solution: This project involved reviewing research on mitosis detection to identify the most promising approaches. Object detectors based on YOLO are extremely fast but have low recall on small objects, while ones based on Faster R-CNN perform better on tiny objects like mitoses. RetinaNet can provide further improvements by focusing the loss on hard examples. For fine-grained classification tasks, a second stage classifier may even be necessary to discard more challenging mitosis look-alikes.