Deep Neural Networks with Prior Evidence for Bladder Cancer Staging

Bladder cancer staging is crucial for operation planning and cancer assessment. Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) have been widely used to classify the bladder tumor images to identify cancer stages. However, the pure image-based deep learning methods over depend on the labeled data training and neglect the clinical priors. Human doctors judge the stage of a bladder tumor through checking whether the tumor infiltrating into bladder wall. The clinical priors of tumor infiltration are helpful to improve the DCNN-based bladder cancer staging and make the predictions coincide with the law of medicine. To involve clinical priors into deep learning for cancer staging, we propose a DCNN model with prior evidence to classify medical images of bladder tumors. Specifically, we measure the degree of tumor infiltrating into bladder wall to construct the prior evidence and integrate the prior evidence into the image-based prediction with evidential deep neural networks. We analyze the learning objective and prove that the prior evidences consistent with the ground truth will certainly reduce the prediction error and variance produced by image-based neural networks. The experiments on bladder cancer MR images datasets validate that involving prior evidences is effective to improve the DCNN-based cancer staging.