A cell-interacting and multi-correcting method for automatic circulating tumor cells detection

Sensitive detection of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from peripheral blood can serve as an effective tool in the early diagnosis and prognosis of cancer. Many methods based on modern object detectors were proposed in recent years for automatic abnormal cells detection in slide images. Although the modes of these methods can also be applied to the CTCs detection, several practical difficulties lead to suboptimal performance of them, such as accurate capture of CTCs in a large number of mixed cells and identification of CTCs and CTC-like cells with similar visual characteristics. Here, we develop a new cell-interacting and multi-correcting detector called CMD, and apply H&E-stained slide images to detect CTCs automatically for the first time. Specifically, the proposed method incorporates two task-oriented novel modules: (1) a self-attention module for aggregating feature interactions between cells and allowing the model to pay more attention to key abnormal cells, (2) a hard sample mining sampler for progressively correcting predictions of cells with ambiguous classification boundaries. Experiments conducted on a multi-center dataset of 1247 annotated slide images confirm the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art cell detection methods. The results of ablation experiment part also prove the effectiveness of two modules. The source codes of this paper are available at https://github.com/zx333445/CMD.