Gravity Network for end-to-end small lesion detection

TL;DR

GravityNet is a new end-to-end detector that uses dynamic gravity points to improve small lesion detection in medical images, addressing localization challenges with promising experimental results.

Contribution

Introduces GravityNet, a novel architecture with pixel-based gravity anchors that dynamically move towards lesions for improved detection accuracy.

Findings

Effective detection of small lesions in mammograms and fundus images.

Outperforms some existing methods in small lesion localization.

Demonstrates robustness across different medical imaging tasks.

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel one-stage end-to-end detector specifically designed to detect small lesions in medical images. Precise localization of small lesions presents challenges due to their appearance and the diverse contextual backgrounds in which they are found. To address this, our approach introduces a new type of pixel-based anchor that dynamically moves towards the targeted lesion for detection. We refer to this new architecture as GravityNet, and the novel anchors as gravity points since they appear to be "attracted" by the lesions. We conducted experiments on two well-established medical problems involving small lesions to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach: microcalcifications detection in digital mammograms and microaneurysms detection in digital fundus images. Our method demonstrates promising results in effectively detecting small lesions in these medical imaging tasks.