A transparent, lightweight and sustainable Green Learning AI model for prostate cancer detection on MRI

To develop a novel transparent and lightweight machine learning model, the Green Learning (GL), for automated prostate segmentation (PS) and clinically significant prostate cancer (csPCa) detection on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Men who underwent 3-T MRI and prostate biopsy (PBx) were identified. MRI was acquired and interpreted according to the Prostate Imaging-Reporting and Data System (PI-RADS), version 2 or 2.1. The GL was created to automate PS and csPCa detection on biparametric MRI. The performance was compared to the standard-of-care radiologists using PI-RADS, and a conventional deep learning (DL) U-Net model as benchmarking. The PS performance was evaluated by the Dice similarity coefficient (DSC). The area under the curve (AUC) for patient-level csPCa detection was assessed. Model size and computational workload, measured by floating point operations (FLOPs), were reported.

A total of 602 MRIs were randomly divided for training (N = 483) and testing (N = 119). Overall, 224 patients had csPCa on PBx. The median DSC for PS was higher for GL than U-Net (0.91 vs 0.88, P < 0.001). The AUC for csPCa detection of GL was similar to PI-RADS (0.75 vs 0.76, P = 0.8) and U-Net (vs 0.74, P = 0.3). A combination of GL and PI-RADS showed a higher AUC of 0.81 than PI-RADS alone (P = 0.02). Compared with U-Net, the GL had smaller magnitude parameters (1.21× 10⁶ vs 177× 10⁶) and less computational workload (9.8× 10⁹ vs 1027× 10⁹ FLOPs).

A novel GL model fully automatically detects csPCa on prostate biparametric MRI with comparable performance to PI-RADS and DL. Combined with PI-RADS, GL significantly improves csPCa detection.