Purpose
To develop an MRI-based model for clinically significant prostate cancer
(csPCa) diagnosis that can resist rectal artifact interference.
Materials and Methods
This retrospective study included 2203 male patients with prostate
lesions who underwent biparametric MRI and biopsy between January 2019
and June 2023. Targeted adversarial training with proprietary
adversarial samples (TPAS) strategy was proposed to enhance model
resistance against rectal artifacts. The automated csPCa diagnostic
models trained with and without TPAS were compared using multicenter
validation datasets. The impact of rectal artifacts on the diagnostic
performance of each model at the patient and lesion levels was compared
using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC)
and the area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC). The AUC between
models was compared using the DeLong test, and the AUPRC was compared
using the bootstrap method.
Results
The TPAS model exhibited diagnostic performance improvements of 6% at the
patient level (AUC: 0.87 vs 0.81,
P
< .001) and
7% at the lesion level (AUPRC: 0.84 vs 0.77,
P
= .007)
compared with the control model. The TPAS model demonstrated less
performance decline in the presence of rectal artifact–pattern
adversarial noise than the control model (ΔAUC: −17% vs
−19%, ΔAUPRC: −18% vs −21%). The TPAS model
performed better than the control model in patients with moderate (AUC:
0.79 vs 0.73, AUPRC: 0.68 vs 0.61) and severe (AUC: 0.75 vs 0.57, AUPRC:
0.69 vs 0.59) artifacts.
Conclusion
This study demonstrates that the TPAS model can reduce rectal artifact
interference in MRI-based csPCa diagnosis, thereby improving its
performance in clinical applications.
Keywords:
MR–Diffusion-weighted Imaging, Urinary,
Prostate, Comparative Studies, Diagnosis, Transfer Learning
Clinical trial registration no. ChiCTR23000069832
Supplemental material is available for this
article.
Published under a CC BY 4.0 license.