Deep Learning by Domain Transfer for Early Tumor Detection in the Urinary Bladder

Abstract Background: Bladder cancer (BCa) is the second most common genitourinary malignancy and has a mortality of 165,000 deaths p.a. The diagnosis of BCa is mostly carried out using cystoscopy - the visual examination of the urinary bladder with an endoscope. White light cystoscopy is currently considered as gold standard for the diagnosis. Nevertheless, especially flat, small or weakly textured lesions, are very difficult to detect and diagnose. Objective: With the advent of deep learning and already commercially available systems for the detection of adenomas in colonoscopy, it is investigated how such a system - for colonoscopy - performs if retrained and tested with cystoscopy images. Methods: A deep neural network with a YOLOv7-tiny architecture was pre-trained on 35,699 colonoscopy images (partially from Mannheim), yielding a precision = 0.92, sensitivity = 0.90, F1 = 0.91 on public colonoscopy data collections. Results: Testing this adenomadetection network with cystoscopy images from three sources (Ulm, Erlangen, Pforzheim), F1 scores in the range of 0.67 to 0.74 could be achieved. The network was then retrained with 12,066 cystoscopy images (from Mannheim), yielding improved F1 scores in the range of 0.78 to 0.85. Conclusion: It could be shown that a deep learning network for adenoma detection in colonoscopy is ad-hoc able to detect approximately 75% of the lesions in the urinary bladder in cystoscopy images, suggesting that these lesions have a similar appearance. After retraining the network with additional cystoscopy data, the performance for urinary lesion detection could be improved, indicating that a domain-shift with adequate additional data is feasible.