Deep Attentive Panoptic Model for Prostate Cancer Detection Using Biparametric MRI Scans

Multi-parametric MRI (mp-MRI) has recently been established in major guidelines as a first-line diagnostic test for men suspected of having prostate cancer (PCa) primarily to detect and classify clinically significant lesions. However, widespread utilization is still challenged by 1) the difficulty of interpretation specifically for radiologists less experienced in reading mp-MRI scans, and 2) decreased productivity associated with increased time spent per case for reading these complex scans. Deep learning based lesion detection and segmentation methods have been proposed for radiologists to perform their tasks more accurately and efficiently. In this work, we present a novel panoptic lesion detection and segmentation method with both semantic and instance branches as well as an attention module to optimally incorporate both local and global image features. In a free-response receiver operating characteristics (FROC) analysis for lesion sensitivity on an independent dataset with 243 patients, our method has achieved 89% sensitivity and 85% with 0.94 and 0.62 false positives per patient, respectively. Using the proposed method, we have achieved an unprecedented area under ROC curve (AUC) of 0.897 in identifying clinically significant cases.