Malignancy diagnosis of liver lesion in contrast enhanced ultrasound using an end-to-end method based on deep
Hongyu Zhou1,2,3,4, Jianmin Ding1,2,3,4, Yan Zhou1,2,3,4
1The Third Central Hospital of Tianjin, 83 Jintang Road, Hedong District, Tianjin, 300170, China.
Background:
Contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) is considered as an efficient tool for focal liver lesion characterization, given it allows real-time scanning and provides dynamic tissue perfusion information. An accurate diagnosis of liver lesions with CEUS requires a precise interpretation of CEUS images. However,it is a highly experience dependent task which requires amount of training and practice. To help improve the constrains, this study aims to develop an end-to-end method based on deep learning to make malignancy diagnosis of liver lesions using CEUS.
Methods:
A total of 420 focal liver lesions with 136 benign cases and 284 malignant cases were included. A deep learning model based on a two-dimensional convolution neural network, a long short-term memory (LSTM), and a linear classifier (with sigmoid) was developed to analyze the CEUS loops from different contrast imaging phases. For comparison, a 3D-CNN based method and a machine-learning (ML)-based time-intensity curve (TIC) method were also implemented for performance evaluation.
Results:
Results of the 4-fold validation demonstrate that the mean AUC is 0.91, 0.88, and 0.78 for the proposed method, the 3D-CNN based method, and the ML-based TIC method, respectively.
Conclusions:
The proposed CNN-LSTM method is promising in making malignancy diagnosis of liver lesions in CEUS without any additional manual features selection.
