Exemplar Diffusion: Improving Medical Object Detection with Opportunistic Labels

Abstract: We present a framework to take advantage of existing labels at inference, called \textit{exemplars}, in order to improve the performance of object detection in medical images. The method, \textit{exemplar diffusion}, leverages existing diffusion methods for object detection to enable a training-free approach to adding information of known bounding boxes at test time. We demonstrate that for medical image datasets with clear spatial structure, the method yields an across-the-board increase in average precision and recall, and a robustness to exemplar quality, enabling non-expert annotation. Moreover, we demonstrate how our method may also be used to quantify predictive uncertainty in diffusion detection methods. Source code and data splits openly available online: https://github.com/waahlstrand/ExemplarDiffusion