An end-to-end interpretable machine-learning-based framework for early-stage diagnosis of gallbladder cancer using multi-modality medical data.

backgroundThe accurate early-stage diagnosis of gallbladder cancer (GBC) is regarded as one of the major challenges in the field of oncology. However, few studies have focused on the comprehensive classification of GBC based on multiple modalities. This study aims to develop a comprehensive diagnostic framework for GBC based on both imaging and non-imaging medical data.

methodsThis retrospective study reviewed 298 clinical patients with gallbladder disease or volunteers from two devices. A novel end-to-end interpretable diagnostic framework for GBC is proposed to handle multiple medical modalities, including CT imaging, demographics, tumor markers, coagulation function tests, and routine blood tests. To achieve better feature extraction and fusion of the imaging modality, a novel global-hybrid-local network, namely GHL-Net, has also been developed. The ensemble learning strategy is employed to fuse multi-modality data and obtain the final classification result. In addition, two interpretable methods are applied to help clinicians understand the model-based decisions. Model performance was evaluated through accuracy, precision, specificity, sensitivity, F1-score, area under the curve (AUC), and matthews correlation coefficient (MCC).

resultsIn both binary and multi-class classification scenarios, the proposed method showed better performance compared to other comparison methods in both datasets. Especially in the binary classification scenario, the proposed method achieved the highest accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, F1-score, ROC-AUC, PR-AUC, and MCC of 95.24%, 93.55%, 96.87%, 96.67%, 95.08%, 0.9591, 0.9636, and 0.9051, respectively. The visualization results obtained based on the interpretable methods also demonstrated a high clinical relevance of the intermediate decision-making processes. Ablation studies then provided an in-depth understanding of our methodology.

conclusionThe machine learning-based framework can effectively improve the accuracy of GBC diagnosis and is expected to have a more significant impact in other cancer diagnosis scenarios.