A Single Detect Focused YOLO Framework for Robust Mitotic Figure Detection

Abstract: Mitotic figure detection is a crucial task in computational pathology, as mitotic activity serves as a strong prognostic marker for tumor aggressiveness. However, domain variability that arises from differences in scanners, tissue types, and staining protocols poses a major challenge to the robustness of automated detection methods. In this study, we introduce SDF-YOLO (Single Detect Focused YOLO), a lightweight yet domain-robust detection framework designed specifically for small, rare targets such as mitotic figures. The model builds on YOLOv11 with task-specific modifications, including a single detection head aligned with mitotic figure scale, coordinate attention to enhance positional sensitivity, and improved cross-channel feature mixing. Experiments were conducted on three datasets that span human and canine tumors: MIDOG ++, canine cutaneous mast cell tumor (CCMCT), and canine mammary carcinoma (CMC). When submitted to the preliminary test set for the MIDOG2025 challenge, SDF-YOLO achieved an average precision (AP) of 0.799, with a precision of 0.758, a recall of 0.775, an F1 score of 0.766, and an FROC-AUC of 5.793, demonstrating both competitive accuracy and computational efficiency. These results indicate that SDF-YOLO provides a reliable and efficient framework for robust mitotic figure detection across diverse domains.