A New Automated Prognostic Prediction Method Based on Multi-Sequence Magnetic Resonance Imaging for Hepatic Resection of Colorectal Cancer Liver Metastases

Colorectal cancer is a prevalent and life-threatening disease, where colorectal cancer liver metastasis (CRLM) exhibits the highest mortality rate. Currently, surgery stands as the most effective curative option for eligible patients. However, due to the insufficient performance of traditional methods and the lack of multi-modality MRI feature complementarity in existing deep learning methods, the prognosis of CRLM surgical resection has not been fully explored. This paper proposes a new method, multi-modal guided complementary network (MGCNet), which employs multi-sequence MRI to predict 1-year recurrence and recurrence-free survival in patients after CRLM resection. In light of the complexity and redundancy of features in the liver region, we designed the multi-modal guided local feature fusion module to utilize the tumor features to guide the dynamic fusion of prognostically relevant local features within the liver. On the other hand, to solve the loss of spatial information during multi-sequence MRI fusion, the cross-modal complementary external attention module designed an external mask branch to establish inter-layer correlation. The results show that the model has accuracy (ACC) of 0.79, the area under the curve (AUC) of 0.84, C-Index of 0.73, and hazard ratio (HR) of 4.0, which is a significant improvement over state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, MGCNet exhibits good interpretability.