Toward confident prostate cancer detection using ultrasound: a multi-center study

Deep learning-based analysis of micro-ultrasound images to detect cancerous lesions is a promising tool for improving prostate cancer (PCa) diagnosis. An ideal model should confidently identify cancer while responding with appropriate uncertainty when presented with out-of-distribution inputs that arise during deployment due to imaging artifacts and the biological heterogeneity of patients and prostatic tissue.

Using micro-ultrasound data from 693 patients across 5 clinical centers who underwent micro-ultrasound guided prostate biopsy, we train and evaluate convolutional neural network models for PCa detection. To improve robustness to out-of-distribution inputs, we employ and comprehensively benchmark several state-of-the-art uncertainty estimation methods.

PCa detection models achieve performance scores up to \(76\%\) $76\%$ average AUROC with a 10-fold cross validation setup. Models with uncertainty estimation obtain expected calibration error scores as low as \(2\%\) $2\%$ , indicating that confident predictions are very likely to be correct. Visualizations of the model output demonstrate that the model correctly identifies healthy versus malignant tissue.

Deep learning models have been developed to confidently detect PCa lesions from micro-ultrasound. The performance of these models, determined from a large and diverse dataset, is competitive with visual analysis of magnetic resonance imaging, the clinical benchmark to identify PCa lesions for targeted biopsy. Deep learning with micro-ultrasound should be further studied as an avenue for targeted prostate biopsy.