scholarly journals Deep Convolutional Neural Network-Based Positron Emission Tomography Analysis Predicts Esophageal Cancer Outcome

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (6) ◽  
pp. 844 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheng-Kun Yang ◽  
Joe Chao-Yuan Yeh ◽  
Wei-Hsiang Yu ◽  
Ling-I. Chien ◽  
Ko-Han Lin ◽  
...  

In esophageal cancer, few prediction tools can be confidently used in current clinical practice. We developed a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) with 798 positron emission tomography (PET) scans of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma and 309 PET scans of stage I lung cancer. In the first stage, we pretrained a 3D-CNN with all PET scans for a task to classify the scans into esophageal cancer or lung cancer. Overall, 548 of 798 PET scans of esophageal cancer patients were included in the second stage with an aim to classify patients who expired within or survived more than one year after diagnosis. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) was used to evaluate model performance. In the pretrain model, the deep CNN attained an AUC of 0.738 in identifying patients who expired within one year after diagnosis. In the survival analysis, patients who were predicted to be expired but were alive at one year after diagnosis had a 5-year survival rate of 32.6%, which was significantly worse than the 5-year survival rate of the patients who were predicted to survive and were alive at one year after diagnosis (50.5%, p < 0.001). These results suggest that the prediction model could identify tumors with more aggressive behavior. In the multivariable analysis, the prediction result remained an independent prognostic factor (hazard ratio: 2.830; 95% confidence interval: 2.252–3.555, p < 0.001). We conclude that a 3D-CNN can be trained with PET image datasets to predict esophageal cancer outcome with acceptable accuracy.

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 140-140
Author(s):  
Po-Kuei Hsu ◽  
Joe Yeh

Abstract Background Both lymphovascular invasion, which is characterized by penetration of tumor cells into the peritumoural vascular or lymphatic network, and perineural invasion, which is characterized by involvement of tumor cells surrounding nerve fibers, are considered as an important step for tumor spreading, and are known poor prognostic factors in esophageal cancer. However, the information of these histological features is unavailable until pathological examination of surgical resected specimens. We aim to predict the presence or absence of these factors by positron emission tomography images during staging workup. Methods The positron emission tomography images before treatment and pathological reports of 278 patients who underwent esophagectomy for squamous cell carcinoma were collected. Stepwise convolutional neural network was constructed to distinguish patient with either lymphovascular invasion or perineural invasion from those without. Results Randomly selected 248 patients were included in the testing set. Stepwise approach was used in training our custom neural network. The performance of fine-tuned neural network was tested in another independent 30 patients. The accuracy rate of predicting the presence or absence of either lymphovascular invasion or perineural invasion was 66.7% (20 of 30 were accurate). Conclusion Using pre-treatment positron emission tomography images alone to predict the presence of absence of poor prognostic histological factors, i.e. lymphovascular invasion or perineural invasion, with deep convolutional neural network is possible. The technique of deep learning may identify patients with poor prognosis and enable personalized medicine in esophageal cancer. Disclosure All authors have declared no conflicts of interest.


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