Automatic identification of suspicious bone metastatic lesions in bone scintigraphy using convolutional neural network

BACKGROUND: We aimed to construct an artificial intelligence (AI) guided identification of suspicious bone metastatic lesions from the whole-body bone scintigraphy (WBS) images by convolutional neural networks (CNNs). METHODS: We retrospectively collected the (99m)Tc-MDP WBS images with confirmed bone lesions from 3352 patients with malignancy. 14,972 bone lesions were delineated manually by physicians and annotated as benign and malignant. The lesion-based differentiating performance of the proposed network was evaluated by fivefold cross validation, and compared with the other three popular CNN architectures for medical imaging. The average sensitivity, specificity, accuracy and the area under receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) were calculated. To delve the outcomes of this study, we conducted subgroup analyses, including lesion burden number and tumor type for the classifying ability of the CNN. RESULTS: In the fivefold cross validation, our proposed network reached the best average accuracy (81.23%) in identifying suspicious bone lesions compared with InceptionV3 (80.61%), VGG16 (81.13%) and DenseNet169 (76.71%). Additionally, the CNN model's lesion-based average sensitivity and specificity were 81.30% and 81.14%, respectively. Based on the lesion burden numbers of each image, the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) was 0.847 in the few group (lesion number n ≤ 3), 0.838 in the medium group (n = 4–6), and 0.862 in the extensive group (n > 6). For the three major primary tumor types, the CNN-based lesion identifying AUC value was 0.870 for lung cancer, 0.900 for prostate cancer, and 0.899 for breast cancer. CONCLUSION: The CNN model suggests potential in identifying suspicious benign and malignant bone lesions from whole-body bone scintigraphic images. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12880-021-00662-9.