PENet: Prior evidence deep neural network for bladder cancer staging

Bladder cancer is a heterogeneous, complicated, and widespread illness with high rates of morbidity, death, and expense if not treated adequately. The accurate and exact stage of bladder cancer is fundamental for treatment choices and prognostic forecasts, as indicated by convincing evidence from randomized trials. The extraordinary capability of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) to extract features is one of the primary advantages offered by these types of networks. DCNNs work well in numerous real clinical medical applications as it demands costly large-scale data annotation. However, a lack of background information hinders its effectiveness and interpretability. Clinicians identify the stage of a tumor by evaluating whether the tumor is muscle-invasive, as shown in images by the tumor’s infiltration of the bladder wall. Incorporating this clinical knowledge in DCNN has the ability to enhance the performance of bladder cancer staging and bring the prediction into accordance with medical principles. Therefore, we introduce PENet, an innovative prior evidence deep neural network, for classifying MR images of bladder cancer staging in line with clinical knowledge. To do this, first, the degree to which the tumor has penetrated the bladder wall is measured to get prior distribution parameters of class probability called prior evidence. Second, we formulate the posterior distribution of class probability according to Bayesian Theorem. Last, we modify the loss function based on posterior distribution of class probability which parameters include both prior evidence and prediction evidence in the learning procedure. Our investigation reveals that the prediction error and the variance of PENet may be reduced by giving the network prior evidence that is consistent with the ground truth. Using MR image datasets, experiments show that PENet performs better than image-based DCNN algorithms for bladder cancer staging.