State-of-the-art MR imaging in the work-up of primary hepatocellular tumors

Magnetic resonance (MR) imaging is an imaging modality that has evolved rapidly in the past two decades. The development of advanced hardware and new sophisticated pulse sequences have allowed faster imaging, with increased temporal and spatial resolution. This has resulted in the development and implementation of new acquisition techniques that facilitate improved visualisation of neoplastic processes. In addition, faster sequences enable multiphasic dynamic imaging after intravenous administration of contrast material, which results in better tumor characterisation and improved diagnostic confidence by the reading radiologist. The radiol

Liver imaging reporting and data system: An expert consensus statement

The increasing incidence and high morbidity and mortality of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) have inspired the creation of the Liver Imaging Reporting and Data System (LI-RADS). LI-RADS aims to reduce variability in exam interpretation, improve communication, facilitate clinical therapeutic decisions, reduce omission of pertinent information, and facilitate the monitoring of outcomes. LI-RADS is a dynamic process, which is updated frequently. In this article, we describe the LI-RADS 2014 version (v2014), which marks the second update since the initial version in 2011

PCA-SVM based CAD System for Focal Liver Lesions using B-Mode Ultrasound Images

The contribution made by texture of regions inside and outside of the lesions in classification of focal liver lesions (FLLs) is investigated in the present work. In order to design an efficient computer-aided diagnostic (CAD) system for FLLs, a representative database consisting of images with (1) typical and atypical cases of cyst, hemangioma (HEM) and metastatic carcinoma (MET) lesions, (2) small as well as large hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) lesions and (3) normal (NOR) liver tissue is used. Texture features are computed from regions inside and outside of the lesions. Feature set consisting of 208 texture features, (i.e. 104 texture features and 104 texture ratio features) is subjected to principal component analysis (PCA) for finding the optimal number of principal components to train a support vector machine (SVM) classifier for the classification task. The proposed PCA-SVM based CAD system yielded classification accuracy of 87.2% with the individual class accuracy of 85%, 96%, 90%, 87.5% and 82.2% for NOR, Cyst, HEM, HCC and MET cases respectively. The accuracy for typical, atypical, small HCC and large HCC cases is 87.5%, 86.8%, 88.8%, and 87% respectively. The promising results indicate usefulness of the CAD system for assisting radiologists in diagnosis of FLLs.Defence Science Journal, 2013, 63(5), pp.478-486, DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/dsj.63.395

Diagnostic Performance of Deep Learning-Based Lesion Detection Algorithm in CT for Detecting Hepatic Metastasis from Colorectal Cancer

Objective: To compare the performance of the deep learning-based lesion detection algorithm (DLLD) in detecting liver metastasis with that of radiologists. Materials and methods: This clinical retrospective study used 4386-slice computed tomography (CT) images and labels from a training cohort (502 patients with colorectal cancer [CRC] from November 2005 to December 2010) to train the DLLD for detecting liver metastasis, and used CT images of a validation cohort (40 patients with 99 liver metastatic lesions and 45 patients without liver metastasis from January 2011 to December 2011) for comparing the performance of the DLLD with that of readers (three abdominal radiologists and three radiology residents). For per-lesion binary classification, the sensitivity and false positives per patient were measured. Results: A total of 85 patients with CRC were included in the validation cohort. In the comparison based on per-lesion binary classification, the sensitivity of DLLD (81.82%, [81/99]) was comparable to that of abdominal radiologists (80.81%, p = 0.80) and radiology residents (79.46%, p = 0.57). However, the false positives per patient with DLLD (1.330) was higher than that of abdominal radiologists (0.357, p < 0.001) and radiology residents (0.667, p < 0.001). Conclusion: DLLD showed a sensitivity comparable to that of radiologists when detecting liver metastasis in patients initially diagnosed with CRC. However, the false positives of DLLD were higher than those of radiologists. Therefore, DLLD could serve as an assistant tool for detecting liver metastasis instead of a standalone diagnostic tool.ope

Deep learning for image-based liver analysis — A comprehensive review focusing on malignant lesions

Deep learning-based methods, in particular, convolutional neural networks and fully convolutional networks are now widely used in the medical image analysis domain. The scope of this review focuses on the analysis using deep learning of focal liver lesions, with a special interest in hepatocellular carcinoma and metastatic cancer; and structures like the parenchyma or the vascular system. Here, we address several neural network architectures used for analyzing the anatomical structures and lesions in the liver from various imaging modalities such as computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging and ultrasound. Image analysis tasks like segmentation, object detection and classification for the liver, liver vessels and liver lesions are discussed. Based on the qualitative search, 91 papers were filtered out for the survey, including journal publications and conference proceedings. The papers reviewed in this work are grouped into eight categories based on the methodologies used. By comparing the evaluation metrics, hybrid models performed better for both the liver and the lesion segmentation tasks, ensemble classifiers performed better for the vessel segmentation tasks and combined approach performed better for both the lesion classification and detection tasks. The performance was measured based on the Dice score for the segmentation, and accuracy for the classification and detection tasks, which are the most commonly used metrics.publishedVersio