Purpose <p>Assessing tumor response to systemic therapies is one of the main applications of PET/CT. Routinely, only a small subset of index lesions out of multiple lesions is analyzed. However, this operator dependent selection may bias the results due to possible significant inter-metastatic heterogeneity of response to therapy. Automated, AI-based approaches for lesion tracking hold promise in enabling the analysis of many more lesions and thus providing a better assessment of tumor response. This work introduces a Siamese CNN approach for lesion tracking between PET/CT scans.</p> Methods <p>Our approach is applied on the laborious task of tracking a high number of bone lesions in full-body baseline and follow-up [<sup>68</sup>Ga]Ga- or [<sup>18</sup>F]F-PSMA PET/CT scans after two cycles of [<sup>177</sup>Lu]Lu-PSMA therapy of metastatic castration resistant prostate cancer patients. Data preparation includes lesion segmentation and affine registration. Our algorithm extracts suitable lesion patches and forwards them into a Siamese CNN trained to classify the lesion patch pairs as corresponding or non-corresponding lesions.</p> Results <p>Experiments have been performed with different input patch types and a Siamese network in 2D and 3D. The CNN model successfully learned to classify lesion assignments, reaching an accuracy of 83 % in its best configuration with an AUC = 0.91. For corresponding lesions the pipeline accomplished lesion tracking accuracy of even 89 %.</p> Conclusion <p>We proved that a CNN may facilitate the tracking of multiple lesions in PSMA PET/CT scans. Future clinical studies are necessary if this improves the prediction of the outcome of therapies.</p>

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AI lesion tracking in PET/CT imaging: a proposal for a Siamese-based CNN pipeline applied to PSMA PET/CT scans

  • Stefan P. Hein,
  • Manuel Schultheiss,
  • Andrei Gafita,
  • Raphael Zaum,
  • Farid Yagubbayli,
  • Robert Tauber,
  • Isabel Rauscher,
  • Matthias Eiber,
  • Franz Pfeiffer,
  • Wolfgang A. Weber

摘要

Purpose

Assessing tumor response to systemic therapies is one of the main applications of PET/CT. Routinely, only a small subset of index lesions out of multiple lesions is analyzed. However, this operator dependent selection may bias the results due to possible significant inter-metastatic heterogeneity of response to therapy. Automated, AI-based approaches for lesion tracking hold promise in enabling the analysis of many more lesions and thus providing a better assessment of tumor response. This work introduces a Siamese CNN approach for lesion tracking between PET/CT scans.

Methods

Our approach is applied on the laborious task of tracking a high number of bone lesions in full-body baseline and follow-up [68Ga]Ga- or [18F]F-PSMA PET/CT scans after two cycles of [177Lu]Lu-PSMA therapy of metastatic castration resistant prostate cancer patients. Data preparation includes lesion segmentation and affine registration. Our algorithm extracts suitable lesion patches and forwards them into a Siamese CNN trained to classify the lesion patch pairs as corresponding or non-corresponding lesions.

Results

Experiments have been performed with different input patch types and a Siamese network in 2D and 3D. The CNN model successfully learned to classify lesion assignments, reaching an accuracy of 83 % in its best configuration with an AUC = 0.91. For corresponding lesions the pipeline accomplished lesion tracking accuracy of even 89 %.

Conclusion

We proved that a CNN may facilitate the tracking of multiple lesions in PSMA PET/CT scans. Future clinical studies are necessary if this improves the prediction of the outcome of therapies.