Robust Pathological Detector Training Method on Sparsely Annotated Datasets via Spatial Cues.

Computer-aided diagnosis of pathological images usually requires detection and examination of all positive cells and lesions to make an accurate diagnosis. Therefore, there is an unprecedented demand for effective and reliable methods of training pathological detectors than ever. To train a reliable detector, the training dataset is required to fully annotate all positive instances, such a requirement is challenge and laborious, and is not guaranteed in most cases. However, sparse annotations will limit the training performance of detectors. Here, we propose a novel module named Collaborative Correction Sibling (CCS), which is embedded into the original object detection network to enhance the training performance on sparse annotations in a pioneering way. Specifically, instance-level annotations in the image space can be calibrated by positive instances’ spatial features provided by CCS. Extensive experiments have been conducted on both cellular-and-lesion-level detection tasks, compared with the state of the art methods, our CCS demonstrates the training effectiveness on pathological images.