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Original article|Articles in Press

The utility of Vision Transformer in preoperatively predicting microvascular invasion status of hepatocellular carcinoma

  • Author Footnotes
    # Yilun Xu and Yingying Chen were co-first authors.
    Yilun Xu
    Footnotes
    # Yilun Xu and Yingying Chen were co-first authors.
    Affiliations
    Department of Gastroenterology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou 325000, Zhejiang province, China
    Search for articles by this author
  • Author Footnotes
    # Yilun Xu and Yingying Chen were co-first authors.
    Yingying Chen
    Footnotes
    # Yilun Xu and Yingying Chen were co-first authors.
    Affiliations
    Department of Gastroenterology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou 325000, Zhejiang province, China
    Search for articles by this author
  • Jinming Wu
    Affiliations
    Department of Gastroenterology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou 325000, Zhejiang province, China
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  • Jie Pan
    Affiliations
    Department of Gastroenterology, Wenzhou Central Hospital, Wenzhou 325000, Zhejiang province, China

    Department of Gastroenterology, The Dingli Clinical College of Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou 325000, Zhejiang province, China

    Department of Gastroenterology, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Shanghai University, Wenzhou 325000, Zhejiang province, China
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  • Chengwei Liao
    Affiliations
    Department of Gastroenterology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou 325000, Zhejiang province, China
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  • Huang Su
    Correspondence
    Correspondence.
    Affiliations
    Department of Gastroenterology, Wenzhou Central Hospital, Wenzhou 325000, Zhejiang province, China

    Department of Gastroenterology, The Dingli Clinical College of Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou 325000, Zhejiang province, China

    Department of Gastroenterology, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Shanghai University, Wenzhou 325000, Zhejiang province, China
    Search for articles by this author
  • Author Footnotes
    # Yilun Xu and Yingying Chen were co-first authors.
Published:February 02, 2023DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hpb.2023.01.015

      Abstract

      Background

      Microvascular invasion (MVI) is a risk factor for early recurrence and poor prognosis of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Preoperative assessment of MVI status is beneficial for clinical therapy and prognosis evaluation.

      Methods

      A total of 305 surgically resected patients were included retrospectively. All recruited patients underwent plain and contrast-enhanced abdominal CT. They were then randomly divided into training and validation sets in a ratio of 8:2. Self-attention-based ViT-B/16 and ResNet-50 analyzed CT images to predict MVI status preoperatively. Then, Grad-CAM was used to generate an attention map showing the high-risk MVI patches. Using five-fold cross validation, the performance of each model was evaluated.

      Results

      Among 305 HCC patients, 99 patients were pathologically MVI-positive and 206 were MVI-negative. ViT-B/16 with fusion phase predicted the MVI status with an AUC of 0.882 and an accuracy of 86.8% in the validation set, which is similar to ResNet-50 with an AUC of 0.875 and an accuracy of 87.2%. The fusion phase improved performance a bit as compared to the single phase used for MVI prediction. The influence of peritumoral tissue on predictive ability was limited. A color visualization of the suspicious patches where microvascular has invaded was presented by attention maps.

      Conclusion

      ViT-B/16 model can predict preoperative MVI status in CT images of HCC patients. Assisted by attention maps, it can assist patients in making tailored treatment decisions.

      Abbreviations:

      MVI (microvascular invasion), HCC (hepatocellular carcinoma), CAD (computer-assisted diagnosis), CNN (convolutional neural network), ViT (Vision Transformer), PFS (progression free survival), OS (overall survival), GRAD-CAM (gradient-weighted class activation mapping), ROI (region of interest), RFA (radiofrequency ablation), CT (computed tomography), MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), AUC (area under curve), NLP (natural language processing), SOTA (State-of-the-Art), AP (arterial phase), VP (venous phase), DP (delay phase), PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication Systems), LR (learning rate), ROC (receiver operating characteristic), CV (computer vision)
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