Prostate Cancer Diagnosis With Sparse Biopsy Data And In Presence Of Location Uncertainty.

Prostate cancer is the second most prevalent cancer in men worldwide. Deep neural networks have been successfully applied for prostate cancer diagnosis in magnetic resonance images (MRI). Pathology results from biopsy procedures are often used as ground truth to train such systems. There are several sources of noise in creating ground truth from biopsy data including sampling and registration errors. We propose: 1) A fully convolutional neural network (FCN) to produce cancer probability maps across the whole prostate gland in MRI; 2) A Gaussian weighted loss function to train the FCN with sparse biopsy locations; 3) A probabilistic framework to model biopsy location uncertainty and adjust cancer probability given the deep model predictions. We assess the proposed method on 325 biopsy locations from 203 patients. We observe that the proposed loss improves the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve and the biopsy location adjustment improves the sensitivity of the models.