Diagnosing Ovarian Cancer on MRI: A Preliminary Study Comparing Deep Learning and Radiologist Assessments

This study aimed to compare deep learning with radiologists' assessments for diagnosing ovarian carcinoma using MRI.

This retrospective study included 194 patients with pathologically confirmed ovarian carcinomas or borderline tumors and 271 patients with non-malignant lesions who underwent MRI between January 2015 and December 2020. T2WI, DWI, ADC map, and fat-saturated contrast-enhanced T1WI were used for the analysis. A deep learning model based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) was trained using 1798 images from 146 patients with malignant tumors and 1865 images from 219 patients with non-malignant lesions for each sequence, and we tested with 48 and 52 images of patients with malignant and non-malignant lesions, respectively. The sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and AUC were compared between the CNN and interpretations of three experienced radiologists.

The CNN of each sequence had a sensitivity of 0.77-0.85, specificity of 0.77-0.92, accuracy of 0.81-0.87, and an AUC of 0.83-0.89, and it achieved a diagnostic performance equivalent to the radiologists. The CNN showed the highest diagnostic performance on the ADC map among all sequences (specificity = 0.85; sensitivity = 0.77; accuracy = 0.81; AUC = 0.89).

The CNNs provided a diagnostic performance that was non-inferior to the radiologists for diagnosing ovarian carcinomas on MRI.