A Transfer Learning Approach for Malignant Prostate Lesion Detection on Multiparametric MRI

Purpose: In prostate focal therapy, it is important to accurately localize malignant lesions in order to increase biological effect of the tumor region while achieving a reduction in dose to noncancerous tissue. In this work, we proposed a transfer learning–based deep learning approach, for classification of prostate lesions in multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging images. Methods: Magnetic resonance imaging images were preprocessed to remove bias artifact and normalize the data. Two state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural network models, InceptionV3 and VGG-16, were pretrained on ImageNet data set and retuned on the multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging data set. As lesion appearances differ by the prostate zone that it resides in, separate models were trained. Ensembling was performed on each prostate zone to improve area under the curve. In addition, the predictions from lesions on each prostate zone were scaled separately to increase the area under the curve for all lesions combined. Results: The models were tuned to produce the highest area under the curve on validation data set. When it was applied to the unseen test data set, the transferred InceptionV3 model achieved an area under the curve of 0.81 and the transferred VGG-16 model achieved an area under the curve of 0.83. This was the third best score among the 72 methods from 33 participating groups in ProstateX competition. Conclusion: The transfer learning approach is a promising method for prostate cancer detection on multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging images. Features learned from ImageNet data set can be useful for medical images.