Part I: prostate cancer detection, artificial intelligence for prostate cancer and how we measure diagnostic performance: a comprehensive review

Abstract

MRI has firmly established itself as a mainstay for the detection, staging and surveillance of prostate cancer. Despite its success, prostate MRI continues to suffer from poor inter-reader variability and a low positive predictive value. The recent emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to potentially improve diagnostic performance shows great potential. Understanding and interpreting the AI landscape as well as ever-increasing research literature, however, is difficult. This is in part due to widely varying study design and reporting techniques. This paper aims to address this need by first outlining the different types of AI used for the detection and diagnosis of prostate cancer, next deciphering how data collection methods, statistical analysis metrics (such as ROC and FROC analysis) and end points/outcomes (lesion detection vs. case diagnosis) affect the performance and limit the ability to compare between studies. Finally, this work explores the need for appropriately enriched investigational datasets and proper ground truth, and provides guidance on how to best conduct AI prostate MRI studies. Published in parallel, a clinical study applying this suggested study design was applied to review and report a multiple-reader multiple-case clinical study of 150 bi-parametric prostate MRI studies across nine readers, measuring physician performance both with and without the use of a recently FDA cleared Artificial Intelligence software.1