Preoperative CECT-Based Multitask Model Predicts Peritoneal Recurrence and Disease-Free Survival in Advanced Ovarian Cancer: A Multicenter Study

Abstract

ObjectivePeritoneal recurrence is the predominant pattern of recurrence in advanced ovarian cancer (AOC) and portends a dismal prognosis. Accurate prediction of peritoneal recurrence and disease-free survival (DFS) is crucial to identify patients who might benefit from intensive treatment. We aimed to develop a predictive model for peritoneal recurrence and prognosis in AOC. MethodsIn this retrospective multi-institution study of 515 patients, an end-to-end multi-task convolutional neural network (MCNN) comprising a segmentation convolutional neural network (CNN) and a classification CNN was developed and tested using preoperative CT images, and MCNN-score was generated to indicate the peritoneal recurrence and DFS status in patients with AOC. We evaluated the accuracy of the model for automatic segmentation and predict prognosis. ResultsThe MCNN achieved promising segmentation performances with a mean Dice coefficient of 84.3% (range: 78.8%-87.0%). The MCNN was able to predict peritoneal recurrence in the training (AUC 0.87; 95% CI 0.82–0.90), internal test (0.88; 0.85–0.92), and external test set (0.82; 0.78–0.86). Similarly, MCNN demonstrated consistently high accuracy in predicting recurrence, with an AUC of 0.85; 95% CI 0.82–0.88, 0.83; 95% CI 0.80–0.86, and 0.85; 95% CI 0.83–0.88. For patients with a high MCNN-score of recurrence, it was associated with poorer DFS with P<0.0001 and hazard ratios of 0.1964 (95% CI: 0.1439-0.2680), 0.3249 (95% CI: 0.1896-0.5565), and 0.3458 (95% CI: 0.2582-0.4632). ConclusionsThe MCNN approach demonstrated high performance in predicting peritoneal recurrence and DFS in patients with AOC.