Improving Circulating Tumor Cell Detection Using Image Synthesis and Transformer Models in Cancer Diagnostics

Cancer is the second leading cause of death, significantly threatening human health. Effective treatment options are often lacking in advanced stages, making early diagnosis crucial for reducing mortality rates. Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are a promising biomarker for early detection; however, their automatic detection is challenging due to their heterogeneous size and shape, as well as their scarcity in blood. This study proposes a data generation method using the Segment Anything Model (SAM) combined with a copy-paste strategy. We develop a detection network based on the Swin Transformer, featuring a backbone network, scale adapter module, shape adapter module, and detection head, which enhances CTC localization and identification in images. To effectively utilize both generated and real data, we introduce an improved loss function that includes a regularization term to ensure consistency across different data distributions. Our model demonstrates exceptional performance across five evaluation metrics: accuracy (0.9960), recall (0.9961), precision (0.9804), specificity (0.9975), and mean average precision (<i>mAP</i>) of 0.9400 at an Intersection over Union (IoU) threshold of 0.5. These results are achieved on a dataset generated by mixing both public and local data, highlighting the robustness and generalizability of the proposed approach. This framework surpasses state-of-the-art models (ADCTC, DiffusionDet, CO-DETR, and DDQ), providing a vital tool for early cancer diagnosis, treatment planning, and prognostic assessment, ultimately enhancing human health and well-being.