Application of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Discriminating Benign, Borderline, and Malignant Serous Ovarian Tumors From Ultrasound Images

OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to evaluate the performance of the deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) to discriminate between benign, borderline, and malignant serous ovarian tumors (SOTs) on ultrasound(US) images. MATERIAL AND METHODS: This retrospective study included 279 pathology-confirmed SOTs US images from 265 patients from March 2013 to December 2016. Two- and three-class classification task based on US images were proposed to classify benign, borderline, and malignant SOTs using a DCNN. The 2-class classification task was divided into two subtasks: benign vs. borderline & malignant (task A), borderline vs. malignant (task B). Five DCNN architectures, namely VGG16, GoogLeNet, ResNet34, MobileNet, and DenseNet, were trained and model performance before and after transfer learning was tested. Model performance was analyzed using accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). RESULTS: The best overall performance was for the ResNet34 model, which also achieved the better performance after transfer learning. When classifying benign and non-benign tumors, the AUC was 0.96, the sensitivity was 0.91, and the specificity was 0.91. When predicting malignancy and borderline tumors, the AUC was 0.91, the sensitivity was 0.98, and the specificity was 0.74. The model had an overall accuracy of 0.75 for in directly classifying the three categories of benign, malignant and borderline SOTs, and a sensitivity of 0.89 for malignant, which was better than the overall diagnostic accuracy of 0.67 and sensitivity of 0.75 for malignant of the senior ultrasonographer. CONCLUSION: DCNN model analysis of US images can provide complementary clinical diagnostic information and is thus a promising technique for effective differentiation of benign, borderline, and malignant SOTs.