Semantic Segmentation of Pancreatic Cancer in Endoscopic Ultrasound Images Using Deep Learning Approach

Simple Summary Surgical therapy is critical to pancreatic cancer survival. The segmentation of pancreatic cancer in endoscopic ultrasonography (EUS) images can provide critical characteristics of the pancreatic cancer for surgical therapy. However, EUS has high operator dependency, and it requires a considerable level of experience and competency to stage pancreatic cancer. Deep learning approaches have been used on EUS images, but there have been no studies on the segmentation of pancreatic cancer. The purpose of this study is to segment pancreatic cancer from EUS images using a neural network model with deep attention features, called DAF-Net. The significance of this study lies in the successful segmentation performance of the pancreatic cancer using the DAF-Net, regardless of the size and location of the cancer, and its usefulness in preoperative planning. Endoscopic ultrasonography (EUS) plays an important role in diagnosing pancreatic cancer. Surgical therapy is critical to pancreatic cancer survival and can be planned properly, with the characteristics of the target cancer determined. The physical characteristics of the pancreatic cancer, such as size, location, and shape, can be determined by semantic segmentation of EUS images. This study proposes a deep learning approach for the segmentation of pancreatic cancer in EUS images. EUS images were acquired from 150 patients diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. A network with deep attention features (DAF-Net) is proposed for pancreatic cancer segmentation using EUS images. The performance of the deep learning models (U-Net, Attention U-Net, and DAF-Net) was evaluated by 5-fold cross-validation. For the evaluation metrics, the Dice similarity coefficient (DSC), intersection over union (IoU), receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, and area under the curve (AUC) were chosen. Statistical analysis was performed for different stages and locations of the cancer. DAF-Net demonstrated superior segmentation performance for the DSC, IoU, AUC, sensitivity, specificity, and precision with scores of 82.8%, 72.3%, 92.7%, 89.0%, 98.1%, and 85.1%, respectively. The proposed deep learning approach can provide accurate segmentation of pancreatic cancer in EUS images and can effectively assist in the planning of surgical therapies.