Personalized Pancreatic Tumor Growth Prediction via Group Learning

Tumor growth prediction, a highly challenging task, has long been viewed as a mathematical modeling problem, where the tumor growth pattern is personalized based on imaging and clinical data of a target patient. Though mathematical models yield promising results, their prediction accuracy may be limited by the absence of population trend data and personalized clinical characteristics. In this paper, we propose a statistical group learning approach to predict the tumor growth pattern that incorporates both the population trend and personalized data. In order to discover high-level features from multimodal imaging data, a deep convolutional neural network approach is developed to model the voxel-wise spatio-temporal tumor progression. The deep features are combined with the time intervals and the clinical factors to feed a process of feature selection. Our predictive model is pretrained on a group data set and personalized on the target patient data to estimate the future spatio-temporal progression of the patient’s tumor. Multimodal imaging data at multiple time points are used in the learning, personalization and inference stages. Our method achieves a Dice coefficient of \(86.8\%\,\pm \,3.6\%\) and RVD of \(7.9\%\,\pm \,5.4\%\) on a pancreatic tumor data set, outperforming the DSC of \(84.4\%\,\pm \,4.0\%\) and RVD \(13.9\%\,\pm \,9.8\%\) obtained by a previous state-of-the-art model-based method.