Automated liver lesion detection in (68)Ga DOTATATE PET/CT using a deep fully convolutional neural network

BACKGROUND: Gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumors most commonly metastasize to the liver; however, high normal background (68)Ga-DOTATATE activity and high image noise make metastatic lesions difficult to detect. The purpose of this study is to develop a rapid, automated and highly specific method to identify (68)Ga-DOTATATE PET/CT hepatic lesions using a 2D U-Net convolutional neural network. METHODS: A retrospective study of (68)Ga-DOTATATE PET/CT patient studies (n = 125; 57 with (68)Ga-DOTATATE hepatic lesions and 68 without) was evaluated. The dataset was randomly divided into 75 studies for the training set (36 abnormal, 39 normal), 25 for the validation set (11 abnormal, 14 normal) and 25 for the testing set (11 abnormal, 14 normal). Hepatic lesions were physician annotated using a modified PERCIST threshold, and boundary definition by gradient edge detection. The 2D U-Net was trained independently five times for 100,000 iterations using a linear combination of binary cross-entropy and dice losses with a stochastic gradient descent algorithm. Performance metrics included: positive predictive value (PPV), sensitivity, F(1) score and area under the precision–recall curve (PR-AUC). Five different pixel area thresholds were used to filter noisy predictions. RESULTS: A total of 233 lesions were annotated with each abnormal study containing a mean of 4 ± 2.75 lesions. A pixel filter of 20 produced the highest mean PPV 0.94 ± 0.01. A pixel filter of 5 produced the highest mean sensitivity 0.74 ± 0.02. The highest mean F(1) score 0.79 ± 0.01 was produced with a 20 pixel filter. The highest mean PR-AUC 0.73 ± 0.03 was produced with a 15 pixel filter. CONCLUSION: Deep neural networks can automatically detect hepatic lesions in (68)Ga-DOTATATE PET. Ongoing improvements in data annotation methods, increasing sample sizes and training methods are anticipated to further improve detection performance. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13550-021-00839-x.