Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), the most deadly solid malignancy, is typically detected late and at an inoperable stage. Early or incidental detection is associated with prolonged survival, but screening asymptomatic individuals for PDAC using a single test remains unfeasible due to the low prevalence and potential harms of false positives. Non-contrast computed tomography (CT), routinely performed for clinical indications, offers the potential for large-scale screening, however, identification of PDAC using non-contrast CT has long been considered impossible. Here, we develop a deep learning approach, pancreatic cancer detection with artificial intelligence (PANDA), that can detect and classify pancreatic lesions with high accuracy via non-contrast CT. PANDA is trained on a dataset of 3,208 patients from a single center. PANDA achieves an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.986–0.996 for lesion detection in a multicenter validation involving 6,239 patients across 10 centers, outperforms the mean radiologist performance by 34.1% in sensitivity and 6.3% in specificity for PDAC identification, and achieves a sensitivity of 92.9% and specificity of 99.9% for lesion detection in a real-world multi-scenario validation consisting of 20,530 consecutive patients. Notably, PANDA utilized with non-contrast CT shows non-inferiority to radiology reports (using contrast-enhanced CT) in the differentiation of common pancreatic lesion subtypes. PANDA could potentially serve as a new tool for large-scale pancreatic cancer screening.

Purpose: Accurate prognostic stratification of patients with oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma (OPSCC) is crucial. We developed an objective and robust deep learning–based fully-automated tool called the DeepPET-OPSCC biomarker for predicting overall survival (OS) in OPSCC using [18F]fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG)-PET imaging.Experimental Design: The DeepPET-OPSCC prediction model was built and tested internally on a discovery cohort (n = 268) by integrating five convolutional neural network models for volumetric segmentation and ten models for OS prognostication. Two external test cohorts were enrolled—the first based on the Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) database (n = 353) and the second being a clinical deployment cohort (n = 31)—to assess the DeepPET-OPSCC performance and goodness of fit.Results: After adjustment for potential confounders, DeepPET-OPSCC was found to be an independent predictor of OS in both discovery and TCIA test cohorts [HR = 2.07; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.31–3.28 and HR = 2.39; 95% CI, 1.38–4.16; both P = 0.002]. The tool also revealed good predictive performance, with a c-index of 0.707 (95% CI, 0.658–0.757) in the discovery cohort, 0.689 (95% CI, 0.621–0.757) in the TCIA test cohort, and 0.787 (95% CI, 0.675–0.899) in the clinical deployment test cohort; the average time taken was 2 minutes for calculation per exam. The integrated nomogram of DeepPET-OPSCC and clinical risk factors significantly outperformed the clinical model [AUC at 5 years: 0.801 (95% CI, 0.727–0.874) vs. 0.749 (95% CI, 0.649–0.842); P = 0.031] in the TCIA test cohort.Conclusions: DeepPET-OPSCC achieved an accurate OS prediction in patients with OPSCC and enabled an objective, unbiased, and rapid assessment for OPSCC prognostication.

Objective: To develop an imaging-derived biomarker for prediction of overall survival (OS) of pancreatic cancer by analyzing preoperative multiphase contrast-enhanced computed topography (CECT) using deep learning. Background: Exploiting prognostic biomarkers for guiding neoadjuvant and adjuvant treatment decisions may potentially improve outcomes in patients with resectable pancreatic cancer. Methods: This multicenter, retrospective study included 1516 patients with resected pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) from 5 centers located in China. The discovery cohort (n=763), which included preoperative multiphase CECT scans and OS data from 2 centers, was used to construct a fully automated imaging-derived prognostic biomarker—DeepCT-PDAC—by training scalable deep segmentation and prognostic models (via self-learning) to comprehensively model the tumor-anatomy spatial relations and their appearance dynamics in multiphase CECT for OS prediction. The marker was independently tested using internal (n=574) and external validation cohorts (n=179, 3 centers) to evaluate its performance, robustness, and clinical usefulness. Results: Preoperatively, DeepCT-PDAC was the strongest predictor of OS in both internal and external validation cohorts [hazard ratio (HR) for high versus low risk 2.03, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.50–2.75; HR: 2.47, CI: 1.35–4.53] in a multivariable analysis. Postoperatively, DeepCT-PDAC remained significant in both cohorts (HR: 2.49, CI: 1.89–3.28; HR: 2.15, CI: 1.14–4.05) after adjustment for potential confounders. For margin-negative patients, adjuvant chemoradiotherapy was associated with improved OS in the subgroup with DeepCT-PDAC low risk (HR: 0.35, CI: 0.19–0.64), but did not affect OS in the subgroup with high risk. Conclusions: Deep learning-based CT imaging-derived biomarker enabled the objective and unbiased OS prediction for patients with resectable PDAC. This marker is applicable across hospitals, imaging protocols, and treatments, and has the potential to tailor neoadjuvant and adjuvant treatments at the individual level.

The global rise in steatotic liver disease poses a significant public health challenge. While non-contrast computed tomography scans hold promise for opportunistic detection of steatotic liver disease, their potential for staging and risk assessment remains underexplored. Here we present a multimodal AI model trained on a large dataset, comprising of (n=968) histopathologically and (n=1103) radiologically confirmed cases, validated against both histology (n=660) and MRI-PDFF (n=375) gold standards, demonstrating high accuracy in detecting mild to severe steatosis (AUC: 0.904-0.929) and clinically significant fibrosis (AUC: 0.824-0.888). Furthermore, integrating the model into the standard clinical pathway improves primary risk screening in a retrospective patient cohort (n=1192), identifying 36% more patients at risk of fibrosis progression. Using Cox proportional hazard model, we observe that the intermediate-high risk patients identified by the optimized clinical pathway exhibits a significantly higher incidence of cirrhosis (hazard ratio: 5.54: 2.69-11.42), showcasing the model's potential for early detection and management of steatotic liver disease.

Automated colorectal cancer (CRC) segmentation in medical imaging is the key to achieving automation of CRC detection, staging, and treatment response monitoring. Compared with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography colonography (CTC), conventional computed tomography (CT) has enormous potential because of its broad implementation, superiority for the hollow viscera (colon), and convenience without needing bowel preparation. However, the segmentation of CRC in conventional CT is more challenging due to the difficulties presenting with the unprepared bowel, such as distinguishing the colorectum from other structures with similar appearance and distinguishing the CRC from the contents of the colorectum. To tackle these challenges, we introduce DeepCRC-SL, the first automated segmentation algorithm for CRC and colorectum in conventional contrast-enhanced CT scans. We propose a topology-aware deep learning-based approach, which builds a novel 1-D colorectal coordinate system and encodes each voxel of the colorectum with a relative position along the coordinate system. We then induce an auxiliary regression task to predict the colorectal coordinate value of each voxel, aiming to integrate global topology into the segmentation network and thus improve the colorectum’s continuity. Self-attention layers are utilized to capture global contexts for the coordinate regression task and enhance the ability to differentiate CRC and colorectum tissues. Moreover, a coordinate-driven self-learning (SL) strategy is introduced to leverage a large amount of unlabeled data to improve segmentation performance. We validate the proposed approach on a dataset including 227 labeled and 585 unlabeled CRC cases by fivefold cross-validation. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms some recent related segmentation methods and achieves the segmentation accuracy in DSC for CRC of 0.669 and colorectum of 0.892, reaching to the performance (at 0.639 and 0.890, respectively) of a medical resident with two years of specialized CRC imaging fellowship.