A BCLC Staging System for Hepatocellular Carcinoma using Swin Transformer and CT Imaging

The Barcelona Clinic Liver Cancer (BCLC) staging system plays a crucial role in clinical planning, offering valuable insights for effectively managing hepatocellular carcinoma. Accurate prediction of BCLC stages can significantly ease the workload on radiologists. However, few datasets are explicitly designed for discerning BCLC stages. Despite the common practice of appending BCLC labels to clinical data within datasets, the inherent imbalance in BCLC distribution is further amplified by the diverse purposes for which datasets are curated. In this study, we aim to develop a BCLC staging system using the advanced Swin Transformer model. Additionally, we explore the integration of two datasets, each originally intended for separate objectives, highlighting the critical challenge of preserving class distribution in practical study designs. This exploration is pivotal for ensuring the applicability of our developed staging system in the designed clinical settings. Our resulting BCLC staging system demonstrates an accuracy of 55.81% (±7.8%), contributing to advancing medical image-based research for predicting BCLC stages.