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

Abstract: MIDOG 2025 Track 1 requires mitosis detection in whole-slide images (WSIs) containing non-tumor, inflamed, and necrotic regions. Due to the complicated and heterogeneous context, as well as possible artifacts, there are often false positives and false negatives, thus degrading the detection F1-score. To address this problem, we propose a two-stage framework. Firstly, an improved YOLO11x, integrated with EMA attention and LSConv, is employed to generate mitosis candidates. We use a low confidence threshold to generate as many proposals as possible, ensuring the detection recall. Then, a ConvNeXt-Tiny classifier is employed to filter out the false positives, ensuring the detection precision. Consequently, the proposed two-stage framework can generate a high detection F1-score. Evaluated on a fused dataset comprising MIDOG++, MITOS_WSI_CCMCT, and MITOS_WSI_CMC, our framework achieves an F1-score of 0.882, which is 0.035 higher than the single-stage YOLO11x baseline. This performance gain is produced by a significant precision improvement, from 0.762 to 0.839, and a comparable recall. The code is available at https://github.com/xxiao0304/MIDOG-2025-Track-1-of-SZTU.