Real-Time Prediction of Transarterial Drug Delivery Based on a Deep Convolutional Neural Network

This study develops a data-driven reduced-order model based on a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) for real-time and accurate prediction of the drug trajectory and concentration field in transarterial chemoembolization therapy to assist in directing the drug to the tumor site. The convolutional and deconvoluational layers are used as the encoder and the decoder, respectively. The input of the network model is designed to contain the information of drug injection location and the blood vessel geometry and the output consists of the drug trajectory and the concentration field. We studied drug delivery in two-dimensional straight, bifurcated blood vessels and the human hepatic artery system and showed that the proposed model can quickly and accurately predict the spatial-temporal drug concentration field. For the human hepatic artery system, the most complex case, the average prediction accuracy was 99.9% compared with the CFD prediction. Further, the prediction time for each concentration field was less than 0.07 s, which is four orders faster than the corresponding CFD simulation. The high performance, accuracy and speed of the CNN model shows the potential for effectively assisting physicians in directing chemoembolization drugs to tumor-bearing segments, thus improving its efficacy in real-time.