# An Efficient Anchor-free Universal Lesion Detection in CT-scans

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.16074 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16074/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05747/) (2017)
- [MULAN: Multitask Universal Lesion Analysis Network for Joint Lesion Detection, Tagging, and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04373/) (2019)
- [Improving RetinaNet for CT Lesion Detection with Dense Masks from Weak RECIST Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02283/) (2019)
- [3D Context Enhanced Region-based Convolutional Neural Network for End-to-End Lesion Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09648/) (2018)
- [MVP-Net: Multi-view FPN with Position-aware Attention for Deep Universal Lesion Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04247/) (2019)
- [Universal Lesion Detection by Learning from Multiple Heterogeneously Labeled Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13753/) (2020)
- [3D Anchor-Free Lesion Detector on Computed Tomography Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11324/) (2019)
- [Multi-Scale Supervised 3D U-Net for Kidneys and Kidney Tumor Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08108/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing universal lesion detection (ULD) methods utilize compute-intensive anchor-based architectures which rely on predefined anchor boxes, resulting in unsatisfactory detection performance, especially in small and mid-sized lesions. Further, these default fixed anchor-sizes and ratios do not generalize well to different datasets. Therefore, we propose a robust one-stage anchor-free lesion detection network that can perform well across varying lesions sizes by exploiting the fact that the box predictions can be sorted for relevance based on their center rather than their overlap with the object. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the ULD can be improved by explicitly providing it the domain-specific information in the form of multi-intensity images generated using multiple HU windows, followed by self-attention based feature-fusion and backbone initialization using weights learned via self-supervision over CT-scans. We obtain comparable results to the state-of-the-art methods, achieving an overall sensitivity of 86.05% on the DeepLesion dataset, which comprises of approximately 32K CT-scans with lesions annotated across various body organs.