Multicenter Study of the Utility of Convolutional Neural Network and Transformer Models for the Detection and Segmentation of Meningiomas

Purpose This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness and practicality of using models like convolutional neural network and transformer in detecting and precise segmenting meningioma from magnetic resonance images. Methods The retrospective study on T1-weighted and contrast-enhanced images of 523 meningioma patients from 3 centers between 2010 and 2020. A total of 373 cases split 8:2 for training and validation. Three independent test sets were built based on the remaining 150 cases. Six convolutional neural network detection models trained via transfer learning were evaluated using 4 metrics and receiver operating characteristic analysis. Detected images were used for segmentation. Three segmentation models were trained for meningioma segmentation and were evaluated via 4 metrics. In 3 test sets, intraclass consistency values were used to evaluate the consistency of detection and segmentation models with manually annotated results from 3 different levels of radiologists. Results The average accuracies of the detection model in the 3 test sets were 97.3%, 93.5%, and 96.0%, respectively. The model of segmentation showed mean Dice similarity coefficient values of 0.884, 0.834, and 0.892, respectively. Intraclass consistency values showed that the results of detection and segmentation models were highly consistent with those of intermediate and senior radiologists and lowly consistent with those of junior radiologists. Conclusions The proposed deep learning system exhibits advanced performance comparable with intermediate and senior radiologists in meningioma detection and segmentation. This system could potentially significantly improve the efficiency of the detection and segmentation of meningiomas.