Integrating Prostate Specific Antigen Density Biomarker Into Deep Learning Prostate MRI Lesion Segmentation Models

Prostate cancer lesion segmentation in multi-parametric magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI) is crucial for pre-biopsy diagnosis and targeted biopsy guidance. Deep convolution neural networks have been widely utilized for lesion segmentation. However, these methods fail to achieve a high Dice coefficient because of the large variations in lesion size and location within the gland. To address this problem, we integrate the clinically-meaningful prostate specific antigen density (PSAD) biomarker into the deep learning model using feature-wise transformations to condition the features in latent space, and thus control the size of lesion prediction. We tested our models on a public dataset with 214 annotated mpMRI scans and compared the segmentation performance to a baseline 3D U-Net model. Results demonstrate that integrating the PSAD biomarker significantly improves segmentation performance in both Dice coefficient and centroid distance metric.