Scalable and Efficient Deep Learning-Based Pipeline for Mitotic Detection and Analysis in Pathology Images.

Background: Accurate and efficient analysis of mitotic figures in whole-slide images (WSIs) is essential for tumor grading and prognosis. Methods: In this work, we present a three-stage pipeline for WSI-scale mitosis analysis that balances accuracy with clinical throughput: (1) a YOLOv11-based detector to propose mitosis candidates; (2) an ultra-lightweight classifier to refine detections and suppress false positives; and (3) a downstream classifier to distinguish atypical from normal mitoses for deeper biological insight. Results: In benchmark datasets, the two-stage detector improves F1 over detection-only baselines, while the atypical/normal module achieves strong accuracy, demonstrating cross-domain generalization. We further perform a proof-of-concept survival analysis on early-stage (I-II) cases from the TCGA-BRCA cohort, suggesting that mitosis-derived features may provide modest incremental prognostic information beyond the clinical baseline and nuclei features. Conclusions: Overall, the method delivers accurate detection, robust atypical mitosis classification, and high efficiency, processing gigapixel WSIs in minutes on a single GPU, positioning it for large-scale translational studies and future clinical workflow validation.

Duke Scholars

Author Dominic Angelo LaBella Radiation Oncology