# MedYOLO: A Medical Image Object Detection Framework

**Authors:** Joseph Sobek, Jose R. Medina Inojosa, Betsy J. Medina Inojosa, S. M. Rassoulinejad-Mousavi, Gian Marco Conte, Francisco Lopez-Jimenez, Bradley J. Erickson  
**arXiv:** [2312.07729](https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.07729)  
**Date:** 2023-12-12  
**Summary page:** https://www.summarizepaper.com/fr/arxiv-id/2312.07729v1/

## Abstract

Artificial intelligence-enhanced identification of organs, lesions, and other structures in medical imaging is typically done using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) designed to make voxel-accurate segmentations of the region of interest. However, the labels required to train these CNNs are time-consuming to generate and require attention from subject matter experts to ensure quality. For tasks where voxel-level precision is not required, object detection models offer a viable alternative that can reduce annotation effort. Despite this potential application, there are few options for general purpose object detection frameworks available for 3-D medical imaging. We report on MedYOLO, a 3-D object detection framework using the one-shot detection method of the YOLO family of models and designed for use with medical imaging. We tested this model on four different datasets: BRaTS, LIDC, an abdominal organ Computed Tomography (CT) dataset, and an ECG-gated heart CT dataset. We found our models achieve high performance on commonly present medium and large-sized structures such as the heart, liver, and pancreas even without hyperparameter tuning. However, the models struggle with very small or rarely present structures.