Multiparametric deep learning tissue signatures for a radiological biomarker of breast cancer: Preliminary results

Purpose Deep learning is emerging in radiology due to the increased computational capabilities available to reading rooms. These computational developments have the ability to mimic the radiologist and may allow for more accurate tissue characterization of normal and pathological lesion tissue to assist radiologists in defining different diseases. We introduce a novel tissue signature model based on tissue characteristics in breast tissue from multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI). The breast tissue signatures are used as inputs in a stacked sparse autoencoder (SSAE) multiparametric deep learning (MPDL) network for segmentation of breast mpMRI. Methods We constructed the MPDL network from SSAE with 5 layers with 10 nodes at each layer. A total cohort of 195 breast cancer subjects were used for training and testing of the MPDL network. The cohort consisted of a training dataset of 145 subjects and an independent validation set of 50 subjects. After segmentation, we used a combined SAE‐support vector machine (SAE‐SVM) learning method for classification. Dice similarity (DS) metrics were calculated between the segmented MPDL and dynamic contrast enhancement (DCE) MRI‐defined lesions. Sensitivity, specificity, and area under the curve (AUC) metrics were used to classify benign from malignant lesions. Results The MPDL segmentation resulted in a high DS of 0.87 ± 0.05 for malignant lesions and 0.84 ± 0.07 for benign lesions. The MPDL had excellent sensitivity and specificity of 86% and 86% with positive predictive and negative predictive values of 92% and 73%, respectively, and an AUC of 0.90. Conclusions Using a new tissue signature model as inputs into the MPDL algorithm, we have successfully validated MPDL in a large cohort of subjects and achieved results similar to radiologists.