DeepPrognosis: Preoperative prediction of pancreatic cancer survival and surgical margin via comprehensive understanding of dynamic contrast-enhanced CT imaging and tumor-vascular contact parsing

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is one of the most lethal cancers and carries a dismal prognosis of ∼10% in five year survival rate. Surgery remains the best option of a potential cure for patients who are evaluated to be eligible for initial resection of PDAC. However, outcomes vary significantly even among the resected patients who were the same cancer stage and received similar treatments. Accurate quantitative preoperative prediction of primary resectable PDACs for personalized cancer treatment is thus highly desired. Nevertheless, there are a very few automated methods yet to fully exploit the contrast-enhanced computed tomography (CE-CT) imaging for PDAC prognosis assessment. CE-CT plays a critical role in PDAC staging and resectability evaluation. In this work, we propose a novel deep neural network model for the survival prediction of primary resectable PDAC patients, named as 3D Contrast-Enhanced Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory network (CE-ConvLSTM), which can derive the tumor attenuation signatures or patterns from patient CE-CT imaging studies. Tumor-vascular relationships, which might indicate the resection margin status, have also been proven to hold strong relationships with the overall survival of PDAC patients. To capture such relationships, we propose a self-learning approach for automated pancreas and peripancreatic anatomy segmentation without requiring any annotations on our PDAC datasets. We then employ a multi-task convolutional neural network (CNN) to accomplish both tasks of survival outcome and margin prediction where the network benefits from learning the resection margin related image features to improve the survival prediction. Our presented framework can improve overall survival prediction performances compared with existing state-of-the-art survival analysis approaches. The new staging biomarker integrating both the proposed risk signature and margin prediction has evidently added values to be combined with the current clinical staging system.