# ElixirNet: Relation-aware Network Architecture Adaptation for Medical Lesion Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.08770 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08770/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [DRDrV3: Complete Lesion Detection in Fundus Images Using Mask R-CNN, Transfer Learning, and LSTM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08095/) (2021)
- [LENAS: Learning-based Neural Architecture Search and Ensemble for 3D Radiotherapy Dose Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06733/) (2021)
- [Hetero-Modal Learning and Expansive Consistency Constraints for Semi-Supervised Detection from Multi-Sequence Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12972/) (2021)
- [Meta-Learning of NAS for Few-shot Learning in Medical Image Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08951/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most advances in medical lesion detection network are limited to subtle modification on the conventional detection network designed for natural images. However, there exists a vast domain gap between medical images and natural images where the medical image detection often suffers from several domain-specific challenges, such as high lesion/background similarity, dominant tiny lesions, and severe class imbalance. Is a hand-crafted detection network tailored for natural image undoubtedly good enough over a discrepant medical lesion domain? Is there more powerful operations, filters, and sub-networks that better fit the medical lesion detection problem to be discovered? In this paper, we introduce a novel ElixirNet that includes three components: 1) TruncatedRPN balances positive and negative data for false positive reduction; 2) Auto-lesion Block is automatically customized for medical images to incorporate relation-aware operations among region proposals, and leads to more suitable and efficient classification and localization. 3) Relation transfer module incorporates the semantic relationship and transfers the relevant contextual information with an interpretable the graph thus alleviates the problem of lack of annotations for all types of lesions. Experiments on DeepLesion and Kits19 prove the effectiveness of ElixirNet, achieving improvement of both sensitivity and precision over FPN with fewer parameters.