ProstAttention-Net: A deep attention model for prostate cancer segmentation by aggressiveness in MRI scans

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Multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (mp-MRI) has shown excellent results in the detection of prostate cancer (PCa). However, characterizing prostate lesions aggressiveness in mp-MRI sequences is impossible in clinical practice, and biopsy remains the reference to determine the Gleason score (GS). In this work, we propose a novel end-to-end multi-class network that jointly segments the prostate gland and cancer lesions with GS group grading. After encoding the information on a latent space, the network is separated in two branches: 1) the first branch performs prostate segmentation 2) the second branch uses this zonal prior as an attention gate for the detection and grading of prostate lesions. The model was trained and validated with a 5-fold cross-validation on a heterogeneous series of 219 MRI exams acquired on three different scanners prior prostatectomy. In the free-response receiver operating characteristics (FROC) analysis for clinically significant lesions (defined as GS>6) detection, our model achieves 69.0%±14.5% sensitivity at 2.9 false positive per patient on the whole prostate and 70.8%±14.4% sensitivity at 1.5 false positive when considering the peripheral zone (PZ) only. Regarding the automatic GS group grading, Cohen's quadratic weighted kappa coefficient (κ) is 0.418±0.138, which is the best reported lesion-wise kappa for GS segmentation to our knowledge. The model has encouraging generalization capacities with κ=0.120±0.092 on the PROSTATEx-2 public dataset and achieves state-of-the-art performance for the segmentation of the whole prostate gland with a Dice of 0.875±0.013. Finally, we show that ProstAttention-Net improves performance in comparison to reference segmentation models, including U-Net, DeepLabv3+ and E-Net. The proposed attention mechanism is also shown to outperform Attention U-Net.