Abstract. Lung cancer is the leading cause for cancer related deaths. As such, there is an urgent need for a streamlined process that can allow radiologists to provide diagnosis with greater efficiency and accuracy. A powerful tool to do this is radiomics: a high-dimension imaging feature set. In this study, we take the idea of radiomics one step further by introducing the concept of discovery radiomics for lung cancer prediction using CT imaging data. In this study, we realize these custom radiomic sequencers as deep convolutional sequencers using a deep convolutional neural network learning architecture. To illustrate the prognostic power and effectiveness of the radiomic sequences produced by the discovered sequencer, we perform cancer prediction between malignant and benign lesions from 97 patients using the pathologically-proven diagnostic data from the LIDC-IDRI dataset. Using the clinically provided pathologically-proven data as ground truth, the proposed framework provided an average accuracy of 77.52% via 10-fold cross-validation with a sensitivity of 79.06% and specificity of 76.11%, surpassing the state-ofthe art method.

A critical step in effective care and treatment planning for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the cause for the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, is the assessment of the severity of disease progression. Chest x-rays (CXRs) are often used to assess SARS-CoV-2 severity, with two important assessment metrics being extent of lung involvement and degree of opacity. In this proof-of-concept study, we assess the feasibility of computer-aided scoring of CXRs of SARS-CoV-2 lung disease severity using a deep learning system. Data consisted of 396 CXRs from SARS-CoV-2 positive patient cases. Geographic extent and opacity extent were scored by two board-certified expert chest radiologists (with 20+ years of experience) and a 2nd-year radiology resident. The deep neural networks used in this study, which we name COVID-Net S, are based on a COVID-Net network architecture. 100 versions of the network were independently learned (50 to perform geographic extent scoring and 50 to perform opacity extent scoring) using random subsets of CXRs from the study, and we evaluated the networks using stratified Monte Carlo cross-validation experiments. The COVID-Net S deep neural networks yielded R$$^2$$ 2 of $$0.664 \pm 0.032$$ 0.664 ± 0.032 and $$0.635 \pm 0.044$$ 0.635 ± 0.044 between predicted scores and radiologist scores for geographic extent and opacity extent, respectively, in stratified Monte Carlo cross-validation experiments. The best performing COVID-Net S networks achieved R$$^2$$ 2 of 0.739 and 0.741 between predicted scores and radiologist scores for geographic extent and opacity extent, respectively. The results are promising and suggest that the use of deep neural networks on CXRs could be an effective tool for computer-aided assessment of SARS-CoV-2 lung disease severity, although additional studies are needed before adoption for routine clinical use.

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BackgroundQuantitative radiomic features provide a plethora of minable data extracted from multi-parametric magnetic resonance imaging (MP-MRI) which can be used for accurate detection and localization of prostate cancer. While most cancer detection algorithms utilize either voxel-based or region-based feature models, the complexity of prostate tumour phenotype in MP-MRI requires a more sophisticated framework to better leverage available data and exploit a priori knowledge in the field.MethodsIn this paper, we present MPCaD, a novel Multi-scale radiomics-driven framework for Prostate Cancer Detection and localization which leverages radiomic feature models at different scales as well as incorporates a priori knowledge of the field. Tumour candidate localization is first performed using a statistical texture distinctiveness strategy that leverages a voxel-resolution feature model to localize tumour candidate regions. Tumour region classification via a region-resolution feature model is then performed to identify tumour regions. Both voxel-resolution and region-resolution feature models are built upon and extracted from six different MP-MRI modalities. Finally, a conditional random field framework that is driven by voxel-resolution relative ADC features is used to further refine the localization of the tumour regions in the peripheral zone to improve the accuracy of the results.ResultsThe proposed framework is evaluated using clinical prostate MP-MRI data from 30 patients, and results demonstrate that the proposed framework exhibits enhanced separability of cancerous and healthy tissue, as well as outperforms individual quantitative radiomics models for prostate cancer detection.ConclusionQuantitative radiomic features extracted from MP-MRI of prostate can be utilized to detect and localize prostate cancer.

The use of high-volume quantitative radiomics features extracted from multi-parametric magnetic resonance imaging (MP-MRI) is gaining attraction for the autodetection of prostate tumors, since it provides a plethora of mineable data, which can be used for both detection and prognosis of prostate cancer. While current voxel-resolution radiomics-driven prostate tumor detection approaches utilize quantitative radiomics features associated with individual voxels on an independent basis, the incorporation of additional information regarding the spatial and radiomics feature relationships between voxels has significant potential for achieving a more reliable detection performance. Motivated by this, we present a novel approach for automatic prostate cancer detection using a radiomics-driven conditional random field (RD-CRF) framework. In addition to the high-throughput extraction and utilization of a comprehensive set of voxel-level quantitative radiomics features, the proposed RD-CRF framework leverages inter-voxel spatial and radiomics feature relationships to ensure that the autodetected tumor candidates exhibit interconnected tissue characteristics reflective of cancerous tumors. We evaluated the performance of the proposed framework using clinical prostate MP-MRI data of 20 patients, and the results of RD-CRF framework demonstrated a clear improvement with respect to the state-of-the-art in quantitative radiomics for automatic voxel-resolution prostate cancer detection. INDEX TERMSAutomatic prostate cancer detection, multi-parametric magnetic resonance imaging (MP-MRI), feature model, conditional random fields (CRF), radiomics.