ConvNeXt with Histopathology-Specific Augmentations for Mitotic Figure Classification
This work addresses a critical problem in cancer grading for pathologists by improving classification accuracy, though it is incremental as it builds on existing architectures and augmentations.
The paper tackled the challenge of classifying atypical mitotic figures from normal ones in computational pathology by proposing a ConvNeXt-based model with histopathology-specific augmentations, achieving a balanced accuracy of 0.8961 on the MIDOG 2025 Challenge leaderboard.
Accurate mitotic figure classification is crucial in computational pathology, as mitotic activity informs cancer grading and patient prognosis. Distinguishing atypical mitotic figures (AMFs), which indicate higher tumor aggressiveness, from normal mitotic figures (NMFs) remains challenging due to subtle morphological differences and high intra-class variability. This task is further complicated by domain shifts, including variations in organ, tissue type, and scanner, as well as limited annotations and severe class imbalance. To address these challenges in Track 2 of the MIDOG 2025 Challenge, we propose a solution based on the lightweight ConvNeXt architecture, trained on all available datasets (AMi-Br, AtNorM-Br, AtNorM-MD, and OMG-Octo) to maximize domain coverage. Robustness is enhanced through a histopathology-specific augmentation pipeline, including elastic and stain-specific transformations, and balanced sampling to mitigate class imbalance. A grouped 5-fold cross-validation strategy ensures reliable evaluation. On the preliminary leaderboard, our model achieved a balanced accuracy of 0.8961, ranking among the top entries. These results highlight that broad domain exposure combined with targeted augmentation strategies is key to building accurate and generalizable mitotic figure classifiers.