• Medientyp: E-Artikel
  • Titel: Application of artificial neural networks for the prediction of lymph node metastases to the ipsilateral axilla – initial experience in 194 patients using magnetic resonance mammography
  • Beteiligte: Dietzel, Matthias; Baltzer, Pascal A. T.; Dietzel, Andreas; Vag, Tibor; Gröschel, Tobias; Gajda, Mieczyslaw; Camara, Oumar; Kaiser, Werner A.
  • Erschienen: SAGE Publications, 2010
  • Erschienen in: Acta Radiologica
  • Sprache: Englisch
  • DOI: 10.3109/02841851.2010.498444
  • ISSN: 0284-1851; 1600-0455
  • Schlagwörter: Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and imaging ; General Medicine ; Radiological and Ultrasound Technology
  • Entstehung:
  • Anmerkungen:
  • Beschreibung: <jats:p> Background: In breast MRI (bMRI), prediction of lymph node metastases (N+) on the basis of dynamic and morphologic descriptors of breast cancers remains a complex task. </jats:p><jats:p> Purpose: To predict N+ using an artificial neural network (ANN) on the basis of 17 previously published descriptors of breast lesions in bMRI. </jats:p><jats:p> Material and Methods: Standardized protocol and study design were applied in this study (T1w-FLASH; 0.1 mmol/kg body weight Gd-DTPA; T2w-TSE; histological verification after bMRI). All lesions were evaluated by two experienced radiologists in consensus. In every lesion 17 previously published descriptors were assessed. Matched subgroups with (N+; n=97) and without N+ were created (N−; n=97), forming the dataset of this study ( n=194). An ANN was constructed (“Multilayer Perceptron”; training: “Batch”; activation function of hidden/output layer: “Hyperbolic Tangent”/”Softmax”) to predict N+ using all descriptors in combination on a randomly chosen training sample ( n=123/194) and optimized on the corresponding test sample ( n=71/194) using dedicated software. The discrimination power of this ANN was quantified by area under the curve (AUC) comparison (vs AUC=0.5). Training and testing cycles were repeated 20 times to quantify the robustness of the ANN (median-AUC; confidence intervals, CIs). </jats:p><jats:p> Results: The ANN demonstrated highly significant discrimination power to classify N+ vs N− ( P&lt;0.001). Diagnostic accuracy reached “moderate” AUC (median-AUC=0.74; CI 0.70–0.76). </jats:p><jats:p> Conclusion: Application of ANNs for the prediction of lymph node metastases in breast MRI is feasible. Future studies should evaluate the clinical impact of the presented model. </jats:p>