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

Journal: Artificial intelligence in medicine
Published Date: May 29, 2025

Abstract

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.

Authors

  • Xuan Zhang
  • Rensheng Lai
    Department of Pathology, Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, Nanjing 210023, China.
  • Ling Bai
  • Jianxin Ji
    Department of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Harbin Medical University, Harbin 150081, China.
  • Ruihao Qin
    Department of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Harbin Medical University, Harbin 150081, China.
  • Lihong Jiang
    Heilongjiang Key Laboratory for Laboratory Animals and Comparative Medicine, College of Veterinary Medicine, Northeast Agricultural University, Harbin 150030, China.
  • Bin Meng
    Department of Pathology, Tianjin Medical University Cancer Institute and Hospital, National Clinical Research Center for Cancer, Key Laboratory of Cancer Prevention and Therapy, Tianjin; Tianjin's Clinical Research Center for Cancer, Tianjin Medical University, Ministry of Education, Tianjin 300060, China.
  • Ying Zhang
    Department of Nephrology, Nanchong Central Hospital Affiliated to North Sichuan Medical College, Nanchong, China.
  • XiaoHan Zheng
    Department of Clinical Pharmacy, School of Basic Medicine and Clinical Pharmacy, China Pharmaceutical University, Nanjing, China.
  • Yan Wang
    College of Animal Science and Technology, Beijing University of Agriculture, Beijing, China.
  • Xiang Kui
    Department of Pathology, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Kunming Medical University, Kunming 650106, China.
  • Liuchao Zhang
    Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Harbin Medical University, Harbin 150086, China.
  • Dimin Ning
    Department of Pathology, Nanjing Jiangbei Jizhi Clinic, Nanjing 210008, China.
  • Liuying Wang
  • Yujiang Chen
    Department of Pathology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Guizhou University of Chinese Medicine, Guizhou 550001, China.
  • Xinling Wang
    Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University Arlington, VA, USA.
  • Shuang Li
    Clinical and Research Center for Infectious Diseases, Beijing Youan Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing, China.
  • Menglei Hua
    Department of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, 150081, China.
  • Junkai Wang
  • Yong Cao
    Department of Neurosurgery, Beijing Tiantan Hospital, Capital Medical University, 100070, Beijing, China.
  • Yuanning Wang
    Department of Pathology, Nanjing Jiangbei Jizhi Clinic, Nanjing 210008, China.
  • Chenjing Ma
    College of Computer and Control Engineering, Northeast Forestry University, No. 26 Hexing Road, Harbin, 150040, Heilongjiang, China.
  • Yanyan Dai
    Department of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Harbin Medical University, Harbin 150081, China.
  • Yongzhen Song
  • Hesong Wang
    Department of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Harbin Medical University, Harbin 150081, China.
  • Meng Wang
    State Key Laboratory of Urban Water Resource and Environment, School of Environment, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China.
  • Jia He
    Shandong College of Electronic Technology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Shandong First Medical University & Shandong Provincial Qianfoshan Hospital, Shandong Key Laboratory of Rheumatic Disease and Translational Medicine, Shandong Lung Cancer Institute, China.
  • Lijun Fan
    School of Public Health, Southeast University, 87, Dingjiaqiao Road, Gulou District, Nanjing, 210009, China.
  • Kang Li
    Department of Otolaryngology, Longgang Otolaryngology hospital & Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Otolaryngology, Shenzhen Institute of Otolaryngology, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China.
  • Mingzhu Yin
    Department of Dermatology, Hunan Engineering Research Center of Skin Health and Disease, Hunan Key Laboratory of Skin Cancer and Psoriasis, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha, Hunan, 410008, P.R. China.
  • Lei Cao
    State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, Liaoning, People's Republic of China. Institutes for Robotics and Intelligent Manufacturing, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, Liaoning, People's Republic of China. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, People's Republic of China.

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