Deep learning for image classification between primary central nervous system lymphoma and glioblastoma in corpus callosal tumors.

Objectives: It can be challenging in some situations to distinguish primary central nervous system lymphoma (PCNSL) from glioblastoma (GBM) based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, especially those involving the corpus callosum. The objective of this study was to assess the diagnostic performance of deep learning (DL) models between PCNSLs and GBMs in corpus callosal tumors.

Materials and methods: The axial T1-weighted gadolinium-enhanced MRI scans of 274 individuals with pathologically confirmed PCNSL (n = 94) and GBM (n = 180) were examined. After image pooling, pre-operative MRI scans were randomly split with an 80/20 procedure into a training dataset (n = 709) and a testing dataset (n = 177) for DL model development. Therefore, the DL model was deployed as a web application and validated with the unseen images (n = 114) and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC); other outcomes were calculated to assess the discrimination performance.

Results: The first baseline DL model had an AUC of 0.77 for PCNSL when evaluated with unseen images. The 2^nd model with ridge regression regularization and the 3^rd model with drop-out regularization increased an AUC of 0.83 and 0.84. In addition, the last model with data augmentation yielded an AUC of 0.57.

Conclusion: DL with regularization may provide useful diagnostic information to help doctors distinguish PCNSL from GBM.