OTHR-13. A DEEP LEARNING APPROACH TO DETECT CANCER METASTASES TO THE BRAIN IN MRI

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Brain metastases have been found to account for one-fourth of all cancer metastases seen in clinics. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is widely used for detecting brain metastases. Accurate detection of the brain metastases is critical to design radiotherapy to treat the cancer and monitor their progression or response to the therapy and prognosis. However, finding metastases on brain MRI is very challenging as many metastases are small and manifest as objects of weak contrast on the images. In this work we present a deep learning approach integrated with a classification scheme to detect cancer metastases to the brain on MRI. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We retrospectively extracted 101 metastases patients, equal to 1535 metastases on 10192 slices of images in a total of 336 scans from our PACS and manually marked the lesions on T1-weighted contrast enhanced MRI as the ground-truth. We then randomly separated the cases into training, validation, and test sets for developing and optimizing the deep learning neural network. We designed a 2-step computer-aided detection (CAD) pipeline by first applying a fast region-based convolutional neural network method (R-CNN) to sequentially process each slice of an axial brain MRI to find abnormal hyper-intensity that may correspond to a brain metastasis and, second, applying a random under sampling boost (RUSBoost) classification method to reduce the false positive metastases. RESULTS: The computational pipeline was tested on real brain images. A sensitivity of 97.28% and false positive rate of 36.25 per scan over the images were achieved by using the proposed method. CONCLUSION: Our results demonstrated the deep learning-based method can detect metastases in very challenging cases and can serve as CAD tool to help radiologists interpret brain MRIs in a time-constrained environment.