Papers › Circle Representation for Medical Object Detection

Circle Representation for Medical Object Detection

22 Oct 2021arXiv:2110.12093archive 2025-07-28

Ethan H. Nguyen, Haichun Yang, Ruining Deng, Yuzhe Lu, Zheyu Zhu, Joseph T. Roland, Le Lu, Bennett A. Landman, Agnes B. Fogo, Yuankai Huo

Box representation has been extensively used for object detection in computer vision. Such representation is efficacious but not necessarily optimized for biomedical objects (e.g., glomeruli), which play an essential role in renal pathology. In this paper, we propose a simple circle representation for medical object detection and introduce CircleNet, an anchor-free detection framework. Compared with the conventional bounding box representation, the proposed bounding circle representation innovates in three-fold: (1) it is optimized for ball-shaped biomedical objects; (2) The circle representation reduced the degree of freedom compared with box representation; (3) It is naturally more rotation invariant. When detecting glomeruli and nuclei on pathological images, the proposed circle representation achieved superior detection performance and be more rotation-invariant, compared with the bounding box. The code has been made publicly available: https://github.com/hrlblab/CircleNet

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hrlblab/CircleNet officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Medical Object DetectionObjectObject Detectionobject-detection

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Medical Object Detection MoNuSeg 2018 CircleNet Average-mAP 0.487 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report

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