An Uncertainty-aware Hierarchical Probabilistic Network for Early Prediction, Quantification and Segmentation of Pulmonary Tumour Growth
This addresses the challenge of predicting lung tumour progression for clinicians, enabling more accurate treatments and surgical planning, though it is an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The study tackled the problem of early detection and quantification of pulmonary tumour growth by developing a deep hierarchical generative and probabilistic framework, achieving a tumour growth balanced accuracy of 74%, size MAE of 1.77 mm, and segmentation Dice score of 78%.
Early detection and quantification of tumour growth would help clinicians to prescribe more accurate treatments and provide better surgical planning. However, the multifactorial and heterogeneous nature of lung tumour progression hampers identification of growth patterns. In this study, we present a novel method based on a deep hierarchical generative and probabilistic framework that, according to radiological guidelines, predicts tumour growth, quantifies its size and provides a semantic appearance of the future nodule. Unlike previous deterministic solutions, the generative characteristic of our approach also allows us to estimate the uncertainty in the predictions, especially important for complex and doubtful cases. Results of evaluating this method on an independent test set reported a tumour growth balanced accuracy of 74%, a tumour growth size MAE of 1.77 mm and a tumour segmentation Dice score of 78%. These surpassed the performances of equivalent deterministic and alternative generative solutions (i.e. probabilistic U-Net, Bayesian test dropout and Pix2Pix GAN) confirming the suitability of our approach.