Deep learning based automated diagnosis of bone metastases with SPECT thoracic bone images.

Journal: Scientific reports
Published Date:

Abstract

SPECT nuclear medicine imaging is widely used for treating, diagnosing, evaluating and preventing various serious diseases. The automated classification of medical images is becoming increasingly important in developing computer-aided diagnosis systems. Deep learning, particularly for the convolutional neural networks, has been widely applied to the classification of medical images. In order to reliably classify SPECT bone images for the automated diagnosis of metastasis on which the SPECT imaging solely focuses, in this paper, we present several deep classifiers based on the deep networks. Specifically, original SPECT images are cropped to extract the thoracic region, followed by a geometric transformation that contributes to augment the original data. We then construct deep classifiers based on the widely used deep networks including VGG, ResNet and DenseNet by fine-tuning their parameters and structures or self-defining new network structures. Experiments on a set of real-world SPECT bone images show that the proposed classifiers perform well in identifying bone metastasis with SPECT imaging. It achieves 0.9807, 0.9900, 0.9830, 0.9890, 0.9802 and 0.9933 for accuracy, precision, recall, specificity, F-1 score and AUC, respectively, on the test samples from the augmented dataset without normalization.

Authors

  • Qiang Lin
    College of Sciences, Zhejiang University of Technology, China.
  • Tongtong Li
  • Chuangui Cao
    School of Mathematics and Computer Science, Northwest Minzu University, No. 1, Xibei Xincun Rd., Lanzhou, 730030, Gansu, China.
  • Yongchun Cao
    School of Mathematics and Computer Science, Northwest Minzu University, No. 1, Xibei Xincun Rd., Lanzhou, 730030, Gansu, China.
  • Zhengxing Man
    School of Mathematics and Computer Science, Northwest Minzu University, No. 1, Xibei Xincun Rd., Lanzhou, 730030, Gansu, China.
  • Haijun Wang
    Department of Intensive Care Unit, National Cancer Center/National Clinical Research Center, Cancer Hospital, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, China.