1. Preliminary study of AI-assisted diagnosis using FDG-PET/CT for axillary lymph node metastasis in patients with breast cancer.
- Author
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Li, Zongyao, Kitajima, Kazuhiro, Hirata, Kenji, Togo, Ren, Takenaka, Junki, Miyoshi, Yasuo, Kudo, Kohsuke, Ogawa, Takahiro, and Haseyama, Miki
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AXILLA , *METASTATIC breast cancer , *LYMPHATIC metastasis , *DIAGNOSIS , *SENTINEL lymph nodes , *CONVOLUTIONAL neural networks , *BREAST implants - Abstract
Background: To improve the diagnostic accuracy of axillary lymph node (LN) metastasis in breast cancer patients using 2-[18F]FDG-PET/CT, we constructed an artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted diagnosis system that uses deep-learning technologies. Materials and methods: Two clinicians and the new AI system retrospectively analyzed and diagnosed 414 axillae of 407 patients with biopsy-proven breast cancer who had undergone 2-[18F]FDG-PET/CT before a mastectomy or breast-conserving surgery with a sentinel lymph node (LN) biopsy and/or axillary LN dissection. We designed and trained a deep 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) as the AI model. The diagnoses from the clinicians were blended with the diagnoses from the AI model to improve the diagnostic accuracy. Results: Although the AI model did not outperform the clinicians, the diagnostic accuracies of the clinicians were considerably improved by collaborating with the AI model: the two clinicians' sensitivities of 59.8% and 57.4% increased to 68.6% and 64.2%, respectively, whereas the clinicians' specificities of 99.0% and 99.5% remained unchanged. Conclusions: It is expected that AI using deep-learning technologies will be useful in diagnosing axillary LN metastasis using 2-[18F]FDG-PET/CT. Even if the diagnostic performance of AI is not better than that of clinicians, taking AI diagnoses into consideration may positively impact the overall diagnostic accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2021
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