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Evaluation of ultrasonic fibrosis diagnostic system using convolutional network for ordinal regression

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Abstract

Purpose

Diagnosis of liver fibrosis is important for establishing treatment and assessing the risk of carcinogenesis. Ultrasound imaging is an excellent diagnostic method as a screening test in terms of non-invasiveness and simplicity. The purpose of this study was to automatically diagnose liver fibrosis using ultrasound images to reduce the burden on physicians.

Methods

We proposed and implemented a system for extracting regions of liver parenchyma utilizing U-Net. Using regions of interest, the stage of fibrosis was classified as F0, F1, F2, F3, or F4 utilizing CORALNet, an ordinal regression model based on ResNet18. The effectiveness of the proposed system was verified.

Results

The system implemented using U-Net had a maximum mean Dice coefficient of 0.929. The results of classification of liver fibrosis utilizing CORALNet had a mean absolute error (MAE) of 1.22 and root mean square error (RMSE) of 1.60. The per-case results had a MAE of 1.55 and RMSE of 1.34.

Conclusion

U-Net extracted regions of liver parenchyma from the images with high accuracy, and CORALNet showed effectiveness using ordinal information to classify fibrosis in the images. As a future task, we will study a model that is less dependent on teaching data.

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, KAKENHI Grants 20H02113 and 18H03548, and the Saitama Prefecture New Technology and Product Development Subsidy Project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Electro-Communications, Chofu, Japan

    Ryosuke Saito, Norihiro Koizumi, Yu Nishiyama, Tsubasa Imaizumi, Kenta Kusahara & Shiho Yagasaki

  2. Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan

    Naoki Matsumoto, Ryota Masuzaki, Toshimi Takahashi & Masahiro Ogawa

Authors
  1. Ryosuke Saito
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  2. Norihiro Koizumi
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  3. Yu Nishiyama
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  4. Tsubasa Imaizumi
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  5. Kenta Kusahara
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  6. Shiho Yagasaki
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  7. Naoki Matsumoto
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  8. Ryota Masuzaki
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  9. Toshimi Takahashi
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  10. Masahiro Ogawa
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Norihiro Koizumi.

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Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical standard

Approval was obtained from the ethics committee of Nihon University Itabashi Hospital (RK-200908–4). The procedures used in this study adhere to the tenets of the Declaration of Helsinki.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Saito, R., Koizumi, N., Nishiyama, Y. et al. Evaluation of ultrasonic fibrosis diagnostic system using convolutional network for ordinal regression. Int J CARS 16, 1969–1975 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-021-02491-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-021-02491-1

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