Automated detection of lung cancer-caused metastasis by classifying scintigraphic images using convolutional neural network with residual connection and hybrid attention mechanism.

Background: Whole-body bone scan is the widely used tool for surveying bone metastases caused by various primary solid tumors including lung cancer. Scintigraphic images are characterized by low specificity, bringing a significant challenge to manual analysis of images by nuclear medicine physicians. Convolutional neural network can be used to develop automated classification of images by automatically extracting hierarchal features and classifying high-level features into classes.

Results: Using convolutional neural network, a multi-class classification model has been developed to detect skeletal metastasis caused by lung cancer using clinical whole-body scintigraphic images. The proposed method consisted of image aggregation, hierarchal feature extraction, and high-level feature classification. Experimental evaluations on a set of clinical scintigraphic images have shown that the proposed multi-class classification network is workable for automated detection of lung cancer-caused metastasis, with achieving average scores of 0.7782, 0.7799, 0.7823, 0.7764, and 0.8364 for accuracy, precision, recall, F-1 score, and AUC value, respectively.

Conclusions: The proposed multi-class classification model can not only predict whether an image contains lung cancer-caused metastasis, but also differentiate between subclasses of lung cancer (i.e., adenocarcinoma and non-adenocarcinoma). On the context of two-class (i.e., the metastatic and non-metastatic) classification, the proposed model obtained a higher score of 0.8310 for accuracy metric.