Pyramid Focusing Network for mutation prediction and classification in CT images

Predicting the mutation status of genes in tumors is of great clinical significance. Recent studies have suggested that certain mutations may be noninvasively predicted by studying image features of the tumors from Computed Tomography (CT) data. Currently, this kind of image feature identification method mainly relies on manual processing to extract generalized image features alone or machine processing without considering the morphological differences of the tumor itself, which makes it difficult to achieve further breakthroughs. In this paper, we propose a pyramid focusing network (PFNet) for mutation prediction and classification based on CT images. Firstly, we use Space Pyramid Pooling to collect semantic cues in feature maps from multiple scales according to the observation that the shape and size of the tumors are varied.Secondly, we improve the loss function based on the consideration that the features required for proper mutation detection are often not obvious in cross-sections of tumor edges, which raises more attention to these hard examples in the network. Finally, we devise a training scheme based on data augmentation to enhance the generalization ability of networks. Extensively verified on clinical gastric CT datasets of 20 testing volumes with 63648 CT images, our method achieves the accuracy of 94.90% in predicting the HER-2 genes mutation status of at the CT image.