Deep-learning model for diagnostic clue: detecting the dural tail sign for meningiomas on contrast-enhanced T1...

Meningiomas are the most common primary central nervous system tumors, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), especially contrast-enhanced T1 weighted image (CE T1WI), is used as a fundamental imaging modality for the detection and analysis of the tumors. In this study, we propose an automated deep-learning model for meningioma detection using the dural tail sign.

The dataset included 123 patients with 3,824 dural tail signs on sagittal CE T1WI. The dataset was divided into training and test datasets based on specific time point, and 78 and 45 patients were comprised for the training and test dataset, respectively. To compensate for the small sample size of the training dataset, 39 additional patients with 69 dural tail signs from the open dataset were appended to the training dataset. A You Only Look Once (YOLO) v4 network was trained with sagittal CE T1WI to detect dural tail signs. The normal group dataset, comprised of 51 patients with no abnormal finding on MRI, was employed to evaluate the specificity of the trained model.

The sensitivity and false positive average were 82.22% and 29.73, respectively, in the test dataset. The specificity and false positive average were 17.65% and 3.16, respectively, in the normal dataset. Most of the false-positive cases in the test dataset were enhancing vessels, misinterpreted as dural thickening.

The proposed model demonstrates an automated detection system for the dural tail sign to identify meningioma in general screening MRI. Our model can facilitate and alleviate radiologists' reading process by notifying the possibility of incidental dural mass based on dural tail sign detection.