Preliminary Results of Deep Learning Approach for Preoperative Diagnosis of Ovarian Cancer Based on Pelvic MRI Scans

Abstract

Background/aim: To predict the pathological diagnosis of ovarian tumors using preoperative MRI images, using deep learning models.

Patients and methods: A total of 185 patients were enrolled, including 40 with ovarian cancers, 25 with borderline malignant tumors, and 120 with benign tumors. Using sagittal and horizontal T2-weighted images (T2WI), we constructed the pre-trained convolutional neural networks to predict pathological diagnoses. The performance of the model was assessed by precision, recall, and F1-score on macro-average with 95% confidence interval (95%CI). The accuracy and area under the curve (AUC) were also assessed after binary transformation by the division into benign and non-benign groups.

Results: The macro-average accuracy in the three-class classification was 0.523 (95%CI=0.504-0.544) for sagittal images and 0.426 (95%CI=0.404-0.446) for horizontal images. The model achieved a precision of 0.63 (95%CI=0.61-0.66), recall of 0.75 (95%CI=0.72-0.78), and F1 score of 0.69 (95%CI=0.67-0.71) for benign tumor. Regarding the discrimination between benign and non-benign tumors, the accuracy in the binary-class classification was 0.628 (95%CI=0.592-0.662) for sagittal images and AUC was 0.529 (95%CI=0.500-0.557).

Conclusion: Using deep learning, we could perform pathological diagnosis from preoperative MRI images.

Keywords: Deep learning; MRI scan; machine learning; ovarian cancers.