# Preserving Dense Features for Ki67 Nuclei Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.05482 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05482/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 Nov 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Domain Adaptation using Silver Standard Labels for Ki-67 Scoring in Digital Pathology: A Step Closer to Widescale Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03872/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Nuclei detection is a key task in Ki67 proliferation index estimation in breast cancer images. Deep learning algorithms have shown strong potential in nuclei detection tasks. However, they face challenges when applied to pathology images with dense medium and overlapping nuclei since fine details are often diluted or completely lost by early maxpooling layers. This paper introduces an optimized UV-Net architecture, specifically developed to recover nuclear details with high-resolution through feature preservation for Ki67 proliferation index computation. UV-Net achieves an average F1-score of 0.83 on held-out test patch data, while other architectures obtain 0.74-0.79. On tissue microarrays (unseen) test data obtained from multiple centers, UV-Net's accuracy exceeds other architectures by a wide margin, including 9-42% on Ontario Veterinary College, 7-35% on Protein Atlas and 0.3-3% on University Health Network.