Weakly supervised deep learning model with size constraint for prostate cancer detection in multiparametric MRI and generalization to unseen domains

Robin Trombetta, Olivier Rouvière, Carole Lartizien

Keywords: Prostate cancer detection, Weakly supervised learning, Domain generalization, Multiparametric MRI, Deep learning

Abstract: Fully supervised deep models have shown promising performance for many medical segmentation tasks. Still, the deployment of these tools in clinics is limited by the very time-consuming collection of manually expert-annotated data. Moreover, most of the state-of-the-art models have been trained and validated on moderately homogeneous datasets. It is known that deep learning methods are often greatly degraded by domain or label shifts and are yet to be built in such a way as to be robust to unseen data or label distributions. In the clinical setting, this problematic is particularly relevant as the deployment institutions may have different scanners or acquisition protocols than those from which the data has been collected to train the model. In this work, we propose to address these two challenges on the detection of clinically significant prostate cancer (csPCa) from bi-parametric MRI. We evaluate the method proposed by (Kervadec et al., 2018) , which introduces a size constaint loss to produce fine semantic cancer lesions segmentations from weak circle scribbles annotations. Performance of the model is based on two public (PI-CAI and Prostate158) and one private databases. First, we show that the model achieves on-par performance with strong fully supervised baseline models, both on in-distribution validation data and unseen test images. Second, we observe a performance decrease for both fully supervised and weakly supervised models when tested on unseen data domains. This confirms the crucial need for efficient domain adaptation methods if deep learning models are aimed to be deployed in a clinical environment. Finally, we show that ensemble predictions from multiple trainings increase generalization performance.

Submission Number: 263