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Extraction of metastasis hotspots in a whole-body bone scintigram based on bilateral asymmetry

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International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Purpose

A hotspot of bone metastatic lesion in a whole-body bone scintigram is often observed as left–right asymmetry. The purpose of this study is to present a network to evaluate bilateral difference of a whole-body bone scintigram, and to subsequently integrate it with our previous network that extracts the hotspot from a pair of anterior and posterior images.

Methods

Input of the proposed network is a pair of scintigrams that are the original one and the flipped version with respect to body axis. The paired scintigrams are processed by a butterfly-type network (BtrflyNet). Subsequently, the output of the network is combined with the output of another BtrflyNet for a pair of anterior and posterior scintigrams by employing a convolutional layer optimized using training images.

Results

We evaluated the performance of the combined networks, which comprised two BtrflyNets followed by a convolutional layer for integration, in terms of accuracy of hotspot extraction using 1330 bone scintigrams of 665 patients with prostate cancer. A threefold cross-validation experiment showed that the number of false positive regions was reduced from 4.30 to 2.13 for anterior and 4.71 to 2.62 for posterior scintigrams on average compared with our previous model.

Conclusions

This study presented a network for hotspot extraction of bone metastatic lesion that evaluates bilateral difference of a whole-body bone scintigram. When combining the network with the previous network that extracts the hotspot from a pair of anterior and posterior scintigrams, the false positives were reduced by nearly half compared to our previous model.

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Notes

  1. Note that these statistics do not include 199 out of 665 patients since age information was not available owing to the anonymization issue.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Engineering, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Koganei, Tokyo, Japan

    Atsushi Saito, Hayato Wakabayashi & Akinobu Shimizu

  2. Department of Radiological Technology, Gunma Prefectural College of Health Sciences, Maebashi, Gunma, Japan

    Hiromitsu Daisaki

  3. Department of Nuclear Medicine, Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka City University, Abeno-ku, Osaka, Japan

    Atsushi Yoshida, Shigeaki Higashiyama & Joji Kawabe

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  1. Atsushi Saito
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Correspondence to Akinobu Shimizu.

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Conflict of interest

This manuscript has not been published elsewhere and is not under consideration for publication in another journal. All authors have approved the manuscript and agree with its submission to IJCARS. Authors Saito A and Shimizu A have received research grants and donation in 2016–2020 from Nihon Medi-Physics Co., Ltd. Authors Yoshida A, Higashiyama S, Kawabe J received research grants in 2016–2020 from Nihon Medi-Physics Co., Ltd. Author Daisaki H received research grants and honorarium in 2018 in his current position from Nihon Medi-Physics Co., Ltd., where he worked for until March 2017. Author Wakabayashi H has no conflict of interest. All procedures in this study involving human participants were performed in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committees and the 1975 Helsinki declaration (as revised in 2008(5)).

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Saito, A., Wakabayashi, H., Daisaki, H. et al. Extraction of metastasis hotspots in a whole-body bone scintigram based on bilateral asymmetry. Int J CARS 16, 2251–2260 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-021-02488-w

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