Accurate preoperative staging and HER2 status prediction of gastric cancer by the deep learning system based on enhanced computed tomography

PURPOSE: To construct the deep learning system (DLS) based on enhanced computed tomography (CT) images for preoperative prediction of staging and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) status in gastric cancer patients. METHODS: The raw enhanced CT image dataset consisted of CT images of 389 patients in the retrospective cohort, The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) cohort, and the prospective cohort. DLS was developed by transfer learning for tumor detection, staging, and HER2 status prediction. The pre-trained Yolov5, EfficientNet, EfficientNetV2, Vision Transformer (VIT), and Swin Transformer (SWT) were studied. The tumor detection and staging dataset consisted of 4860 enhanced CT images and annotated tumor bounding boxes. The HER2 state prediction dataset consisted of 38900 enhanced CT images. RESULTS: The DetectionNet based on Yolov5 realized tumor detection and staging and achieved a mean Average Precision (IoU=0.5) (mAP_0.5) of 0.909 in the external validation cohort. The VIT-based PredictionNet performed optimally in HER2 status prediction with the area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (AUC) of 0.9721 and 0.9995 in the TCIA cohort and prospective cohort, respectively. DLS included DetectionNet and PredictionNet had shown excellent performance in CT image interpretation. CONCLUSION: This study developed the enhanced CT-based DLS to preoperatively predict the stage and HER2 status of gastric cancer patients, which will help in choosing the appropriate treatment to improve the survival of gastric cancer patients.