Artificial Intelligence Methods to Assist the Diagnosis of Pancreatic Diseases in Radiology

Abstract

With its increasing incidence and its five- year survival rate (9%), pancreatic cancer could be- come the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths by 2025. These figures are primarily attributed to late diagnoses, which limit therapeutic options. This the- sis aims to assist radiologists in diagnosing pancrea- tic cancer through artificial intelligence (AI) tools that would facilitate early diagnosis. Several methods have been developed. First, a method for the automatic segmentation of the pancreas on portal CT scans was developed. To deal with the specific anatomy of the pancreas, which is characterized by an elonga- ted shape and subtle extremities easily missed, the proposed method relied on local sensitivity adjust- ments using geometrical priors. Then, the thesis tack- led the detection of pancreatic lesions and main pan- creatic duct (MPD) dilatation, both crucial indicators of pancreatic cancer. The proposed method started with the segmentation of the pancreas, the lesion and the MPD. Then, quantitative features were extracted from the segmentations and leveraged to predict the presence of a lesion and the dilatation of the MPD. The method was evaluated on an external test cohort comprising hundreds of patients. Continuing towards early diagnosis, two strategies were explored to de- tect secondary signs of pancreatic cancer. The first approach leveraged large databases of healthy pan- creases to learn a normative model of healthy pan- creatic shapes, facilitating the identification of anoma- lies. To this end, volumetric segmentation masks were embedded into a common probabilistic shape space, enabling zero-shot and few-shot abnormal shape de- tection. The second approach leveraged two types of radiomics: deep learning radiomics (DLR), extracted by deep neural networks, and hand-crafted radiomics (HCR), derived from predefined formulas. The propo- sed method sought to extract non-redundant DLR that would complement the information contained in the HCR. Results showed that this method effectively de- tected four secondary signs of pancreatic cancer: ab- normal shape, atrophy, senility, and fat replacement. To develop these methods, a database of 2800 exa- minations has been created, making it one of the lar- gest for AI research on pancreatic cancer.

Ähnliche Arbeiten