MA-Det: A Discriminative Morphology-Aware Detector for Cervical Lesion Cell Clumps

Abstract

Automated detection of cervical lesion cell clumps is crucial for cervical cancer screening. However, the dense packing and overlap of cells, caused by adhesion molecules, make detection challenging. To address this issue, we propose the Morphology-Aware Detector (MA-Det). Specifically, by innovatively employing Deformable Convolution, we propose the Dynamic Context Aggregation Module (DCAM) which dynamically captures contextual information, improving the feature representation of lesion cells. To enhance discrimination in high-density regions, we design the Distance-Weighted Interaction Module (DWIM) and Adaptive Morphology-Aware (AMA) loss into the detection head. These components improve spatial awareness by utilizing interactions between cell features and proposals. In particular, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the CDetector and CRIC datasets while significantly reducing parameters.