Classification of metastatic hepatic carcinoma and hepatocellular carcinoma lesions using contrast-enhanced CT based on EI-CNNet.

Background: For hepatocellular carcinoma and metastatic hepatic carcinoma, imaging is one of the main diagnostic methods. In clinical practice, diagnosis mainly relied on experienced imaging physicians, which was inefficient and cannot met the demand for rapid and accurate diagnosis. Therefore, how to efficiently and accurately classify the two types of liver cancer based on imaging is an urgent problem to be solved at present.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to use the deep learning classification model to help radiologists classify the single metastatic hepatic carcinoma and hepatocellular carcinoma based on the enhanced features of enhanced CT (Computer Tomography) portal phase images of the liver site.

Methods: In this retrospective study, 52 patients with metastatic hepatic carcinoma and 50 patients with hepatocellular carcinoma were among the patients who underwent preoperative enhanced CT examinations from 2017-2020. A total of 565 CT slices from these patients were used to train and validate the classification network (EI-CNNet, training/validation: 452/113). First, the EI block was used to extract edge information from CT slices to enrich fine-grained information and classify them. Then, ROC (Receiver Operating Characteristic) curve was used to evaluate the performance, accuracy, and recall of the EI-CNNet. Finally, the classification results of EI-CNNet were compared with popular classification models.

Results: By utilizing 80% data for model training and 20% data for model validation, the average accuracy of this experiment was 98.2% ± 0.62 (mean ± standard deviation (SD)), the recall rate was 97.23% ± 2.77, the precision rate was 98.02% ± 2.07, the network parameters were 11.83 MB, and the validation time was 9.83 s/sample. The classification accuracy was improved by 20.98% compared to the base CNN network and the validation time was 10.38 s/sample. Compared with other classification networks, the InceptionV3 network showed improved classification results, but the number of parameters was increased and the validation time was 33 s/sample, and the classification accuracy was improved by 6.51% using this method.

Conclusion: EI-CNNet demonstrated promised diagnostic performance and has potential to reduce the workload of radiologists and may help distinguish whether the tumor is primary or metastatic in time; otherwise, it may be missed or misjudged.