Paper ID: 2301.12291

CancerUniT: Towards a Single Unified Model for Effective Detection, Segmentation, and Diagnosis of Eight Major Cancers Using a Large Collection of CT Scans

Jieneng Chen, Yingda Xia, Jiawen Yao, Ke Yan, Jianpeng Zhang, Le Lu, Fakai Wang, Bo Zhou, Mingyan Qiu, Qihang Yu, Mingze Yuan, Wei Fang, Yuxing Tang, Minfeng Xu, Jian Zhou, Yuqian Zhao, Qifeng Wang, Xianghua Ye, Xiaoli Yin, Yu Shi, Xin Chen, Jingren Zhou, Alan Yuille, Zaiyi Liu, Ling Zhang

Human readers or radiologists routinely perform full-body multi-organ multi-disease detection and diagnosis in clinical practice, while most medical AI systems are built to focus on single organs with a narrow list of a few diseases. This might severely limit AI's clinical adoption. A certain number of AI models need to be assembled non-trivially to match the diagnostic process of a human reading a CT scan. In this paper, we construct a Unified Tumor Transformer (CancerUniT) model to jointly detect tumor existence & location and diagnose tumor characteristics for eight major cancers in CT scans. CancerUniT is a query-based Mask Transformer model with the output of multi-tumor prediction. We decouple the object queries into organ queries, tumor detection queries and tumor diagnosis queries, and further establish hierarchical relationships among the three groups. This clinically-inspired architecture effectively assists inter- and intra-organ representation learning of tumors and facilitates the resolution of these complex, anatomically related multi-organ cancer image reading tasks. CancerUniT is trained end-to-end using a curated large-scale CT images of 10,042 patients including eight major types of cancers and occurring non-cancer tumors (all are pathology-confirmed with 3D tumor masks annotated by radiologists). On the test set of 631 patients, CancerUniT has demonstrated strong performance under a set of clinically relevant evaluation metrics, substantially outperforming both multi-disease methods and an assembly of eight single-organ expert models in tumor detection, segmentation, and diagnosis. This moves one step closer towards a universal high performance cancer screening tool.

Submitted: Jan 28, 2023