OCDet: A comprehensive ovarian cell detection model with channel attention on immunohistochemical and morphological pathology images.

Abstract

Background: Ovarian cancer is among the most lethal gynecologic malignancy that threatens women's lives. Pathological diagnosis is a key tool for early detection and diagnosis of ovarian cancer, guiding treatment strategies. The evaluation of various ovarian cancer-related cells, based on morphological and immunohistochemical pathology images, is deemed an important step. Currently, the lack of a comprehensive deep learning framework for detecting various ovarian cells poses a performance bottleneck in ovarian cancer pathological diagnosis.

Method: This paper presents OCDet, an object detection model with channel attention, which achieves comprehensive detection of CD3, CD8, and CD20 positive lymphocytes in immunohistochemical pathology slides, and neutrophils and polyploid giant cancer cells in H&E slides of ovarian cancer. OCDet, utilizing CSPDarkNet as its backbone, incorporates an Efficient Channel Attention module for Resolution-Specified Embedding Refinement and Multi-Resolution Embedding Fusion, enabling the efficient extraction of pathological features.

Result: The experiment demonstrated that OCDet performed well in target detection of three types of positive lymphocytes in immunohistochemical images, as well as neutrophils and polyploid giant cancer cells in H&E images. The mAP@0.5 reached 98.82 %, 92.91 %, and 90.49 % respectively, all surpassing other compared models. The ablation experiment further highlighted the superiority of the introduced Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) mechanism.

Conclusion: The proposed OCDet enables accurate detection of multiple types of cells in immunohistochemical and morphological pathology images of ovarian cancer, serving as an efficient application tool for pathological diagnosis thereof. The proposed framework has the potential to be further applied to other cancer types.