  Lesions characterized by computed tomography (CT) scans, are arguably often
elliptical objects. However, current lesion detection systems are predominantly
adopted from the popular Region Proposal Networks (RPNs) that only propose
bounding boxes without fully leveraging the elliptical geometry of lesions. In
this paper, we present Gaussian Proposal Networks (GPNs), a novel extension to
RPNs, to detect lesion bounding ellipses. Instead of directly regressing the
rotation angle of the ellipse as the common practice, GPN represents bounding
ellipses as 2D Gaussian distributions on the image plain and minimizes the
Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the proposed Gaussian and the ground
truth Gaussian for object localization. We show the KL divergence loss
approximately incarnates the regression loss in the RPN framework when the
rotation angle is 0. Experiments on the DeepLesion dataset show that GPN
significantly outperforms RPN for lesion bounding ellipse detection thanks to
lower localization error. GPN is open sourced at
https://github.com/baidu-research/GPN
