Universal Lymph Node Detection in Multiparametric MRI with Selective Augmentation

Robust localization of lymph nodes (LNs) in multiparametric MRI (mpMRI) is critical for the assessment of lymphadenopathy. Radiologists routinely measure the size of LN to distinguish benign from malignant nodes, which would require subsequent cancer staging. Sizing is a cumbersome task compounded by the diverse appearances of LNs in mpMRI, which renders their measurement difficult. Furthermore, smaller and potentially metastatic LNs could be missed during a busy clinical day. To alleviate these imaging and workflow problems, we propose a pipeline to universally detect both benign and metastatic nodes in the body for their ensuing measurement. The recently proposed VFNet neural network was employed to identify LN in T2 fat suppressed and diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) sequences acquired by various scanners with a variety of exam protocols. We also use a selective augmentation technique known as Intra-Label LISA (ILL) to diversify the input data samples the model sees during training, such that it improves its robustness during the evaluation phase. We achieved a sensitivity of ~83% with ILL vs. ~80% without ILL at 4 FP/vol. Compared with current LN detection approaches evaluated on mpMRI, we show a sensitivity improvement of ~9% at 4 FP/vol.