Background and Objectives: Malignant bone tumors represent a major problem due to their aggressiveness and low survival rate. One of the determining factors for improving vital and functional prognosis is the shortening of the time between the onset of symptoms and the moment when treatment starts. The objective of the study is to predict the malignancy of a bone tumor from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) using deep learning algorithms. Materials and Methods: The cohort contained 23 patients in the study (14 women and 9 men with ages between 15 and 80). Two pretrained ResNet50 image classifiers are used to classify T1 and T2 weighted MRI scans. To predict the malignancy of a tumor, a clinical model is used. The model is a feed forward neural network whose inputs are patient clinical data and the output values of T1 and T2 classifiers. Results: For the training step, the accuracies of 93.67% for the T1 classifier and 86.67% for the T2 classifier were obtained. In validation, both classifiers obtained 95.00% accuracy. The clinical model had an accuracy of 80.84% for training phase and 80.56% for validation. The receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) of the clinical model shows that the algorithm can perform class separation. Conclusions: The proposed method is based on pretrained deep learning classifiers which do not require a manual segmentation of the MRI images. These algorithms can be used to predict the malignancy of a tumor and on the other hand can shorten the time of their diagnosis and treatment process. While the proposed method requires minimal intervention from an imagist, it needs to be tested on a larger cohort of patients.
Keywords: bone tumors; convolutional neural networks; deep learning.