AUTHOR=Zhang Gong , Chen Weixiang , Wang Zizheng , Wang Fei , Liu Rong , Feng Jianjiang 

TITLE=Automated diagnosis of pancreatic mucinous and serous cystic neoplasms with modality-fusion deep neural network using multi-modality MRIs

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Oncology

VOLUME=Volume 13 - 2023

YEAR=2023

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/oncology/articles/10.3389/fonc.2023.1181270

DOI=10.3389/fonc.2023.1181270

ISSN=2234-943X

ABSTRACT=Pancreatic cystic neoplasms are increasingly diagnosed with the development of medical imaging technology and people's self-care awareness.However, two of their sub-types, serous cystic neoplasms (SCN) and mucinous cystic neoplasms (MCN), are often misclassified from each other. Because SCN is primarily benign and MCN has a high rate of malignant transformation.Distinguishing SCN and MCN is challenging and essential.MRIs have many different modalities, complete with SCN and MCN diagnosis information. With the help of an artificial intelligence-based algorithm, we aimed to propose a multi-modal hybrid deep learning network that can efficiently diagnose SCN and MCN using multi-modality MRIs.A cross-modal feature fusion structure was innovatively designed, combining features of seven modalities to realize the classification of SCN and MCN. 69   Patients with multi-modalities of MRIs were included, and experiments showed performances of every modality.The proposed method with the optimized settings outperformed all other techniques and human radiologists with high accuracy of 75.07% and an AUC of 82.77%. Besides, the proposed disentanglement method outperformed other fusion methods, and delayed contrast-enhanced T1-weighted MRIs proved most valuable in diagnosing SCN and MCN.Through the use of a contemporary artificial intelligence algorithm, physicians can attain high performance in the complex challenge of diagnosing SCN and MCN, surpassing human radiologists to a significant degree.