CoF-DResNet: Cancer Metastasis Recognition Network based on Dynamic Coordinated Metabolic Attention and Structural Attention.

Background: Cancer metastasis usually means that cancer cells spread to other tissues or organs, and the condition worsens. Identifying whether cancer has metastasized can help doctors infer the progression of a patient's condition and is an essential prerequisite for devising treatment plans. Fluorine 18 fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography/computed tomography ( F -FDG PET/CT) is an advanced cancer diagnostic imaging technique that provides both metabolic and structural information.

Method: In cancer metastasis recognition tasks, effectively integrating metabolic and structural information stands as a key technology to enhance feature representation and recognition performance. This paper proposes a cancer metastasis identification network based on dynamic coordinated metabolic attention and structural attention to address these challenges. Specifically, metabolic and structural features are extracted by incorporating a dynamic coordinated attention module (DCAM) into two branches of ResNet networks, thereby amalgamating high metabolic spatial information from PET images with texture structure information from CT images, and dynamically adjusting this process through iterations.

Discussion: Next, to improve the efficacy of feature expression, a multi-receptive field feature fusion module (MRFM) is included in order to execute multi-receptive field fusion of semantic features.

Result: To validate the effectiveness of our proposed model, experiments were conducted on both a private lung lymph nodes dataset and a public soft tissue sarcomas dataset.

Conclusion: The accuracy of our method reached 76.0% and 75.1% for the two datasets, respectively, demonstrating an improvement of 6.8% and 5.6% compared to ResNet, thus affirming the efficacy of our method.