Purpose While multi‐parametric magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) shows great promise in assisting with prostate cancer diagnosis and localization, subtle differences in appearance between cancer and normal tissue lead to many false positive and false negative interpretations by radiologists. We sought to automatically detect aggressive cancer (Gleason pattern ≥ 4) and indolent cancer (Gleason pattern 3) on a per‐pixel basis on MRI to facilitate the targeting of aggressive cancer during biopsy. Methods We created the Stanford Prostate Cancer Network (SPCNet), a convolutional neural network model, trained to distinguish between aggressive cancer, indolent cancer, and normal tissue on MRI. Ground truth cancer labels were obtained by registering MRI with whole‐mount digital histopathology images from patients who underwent radical prostatectomy. Before registration, these histopathology images were automatically annotated to show Gleason patterns on a per‐pixel basis. The model was trained on data from 78 patients who underwent radical prostatectomy and 24 patients without prostate cancer. The model was evaluated on a pixel and lesion level in 322 patients, including six patients with normal MRI and no cancer, 23 patients who underwent radical prostatectomy, and 293 patients who underwent biopsy. Moreover, we assessed the ability of our model to detect clinically significant cancer (lesions with an aggressive component) and compared it to the performance of radiologists. Results Our model detected clinically significant lesions with an area under the receiver operator characteristics curve of 0.75 for radical prostatectomy patients and 0.80 for biopsy patients. Moreover, the model detected up to 18% of lesions missed by radiologists, and overall had a sensitivity and specificity that approached that of radiologists in detecting clinically significant cancer. Conclusions Our SPCNet model accurately detected aggressive prostate cancer. Its performance approached that of radiologists, and it helped identify lesions otherwise missed by radiologists. Our model has the potential to assist physicians in specifically targeting the aggressive component of prostate cancers during biopsy or focal treatment.

No abstract

No abstract

Targeted biopsy improves prostate cancer diagnosis. Accurate prostate segmentation on MRI is critical for accurate biopsy. Manual gland segmentation is tedious and time-consuming. We sought to develop a deep learning model to rapidly and accurately segment the prostate on MRI and to implement it as part of routine MR-US fusion biopsy in the clinic.Materials and methods: 905 subjects underwent multiparametric MRI at 29 institutions, followed by MR-US fusion biopsy at one institution. A urologic oncology expert segmented the prostate on axial T2-weighted MRI scans. We trained a deep learning model, ProGNet, on 805 cases. We retrospectively tested ProGNet on 100 independent internal and 56 external cases. We prospectively implemented ProGNet as part of the fusion biopsy procedure for 11 patients. We compared ProGNet performance to two deep learning networks (U-Net and HED) and radiology technicians. The Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) was used to measure overlap with expert segmentations. DSCs were compared using paired t-tests. Results: ProGNet (DSC=0.92) outperformed U-Net (DSC=0.85, p<0.0001), HED (DSC=0.80, p<0.0001), and radiology technicians (DSC=0.89, p<0.0001) in the retrospective internal test set. In the prospective cohort, ProGNet (DSC=0.93) outperformed radiology technicians (DSC=0.90, p<0.0001). ProGNet took just 35 seconds per case (vs. 10 minutes for radiology technicians) to yield a clinically utilizable segmentation file. Conclusions: This is the first study to employ a deep learning model for prostate gland segmentation for targeted biopsy in routine urologic clinical practice, while reporting results

Background: Prostate cancer remains the second deadliest cancer for American men despite clinical advancements. Currently, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is considered the most sensitive non-invasive imaging modality that enables visualization, detection, and localization of prostate cancer, and is increasingly used to guide targeted biopsies for prostate cancer diagnosis. However, its utility remains limited due to high rates of false positives and false negatives as well as low inter-reader agreements. Purpose: Machine learning methods to detect and localize cancer on prostate MRI can help standardize radiologist interpretations. However, existing machine learning methods vary not only in model architecture, but also in the ground truth labeling strategies used for model training. We compare different labeling strategies and the effects they have on the performance of different machine learning models for prostate cancer detection on MRI. Methods: Four different deep learning models (SPCNet, U-Net, branched U-Net, and DeepLabv3+) were trained to detect prostate cancer on MRI using 75 patients with radical prostatectomy, and evaluated using 40 patients with radical prostatectomy and 275 patients with targeted biopsy. Each deep learning model was trained with four different label types: pathology-confirmed radiologist labels, pathologist labels on whole-mount histopathology images, and lesion-level and pixel-level digital pathologist labels (previously validated deep learning algorithm on histopathology images to predict pixel-level Gleason patterns) on whole-mount histopathology images. The pathologist andThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.