Detecting Mitosis against Domain Shift using a Fused Detector and Deep Ensemble Classification Model for MIDOG Challenge

Abstract: Mitotic figure count is an important marker of tumor proliferation and has been shown to be associated with patients' prognosis. Deep learning based mitotic figure detection methods have been utilized to automatically locate the cell in mitosis using hematoxylin & eosin (H&E) stained images. However, the model performance deteriorates due to the large variation of color tone and intensity in H&E images. In this work, we proposed a two stage mitotic figure detection framework by fusing a detector and a deep ensemble classification model. To alleviate the impact of color variation in H&E images, we utilize both stain normalization and data augmentation, aiding model to learn color irrelevant features. The proposed model obtains an F1 score of 0.7550 on the preliminary testing set released by the MIDOG challenge.