Automatic Classification of Focal Liver Lesions Based on Multi-Sequence MRI.

Abstract

Accurate and automated diagnosis of focal liver lesions is critical for effective radiological practice and patient treatment planning. This study presents a deep learning model specifically developed for classifying focal liver lesions across eight different MRI sequences, categorizing them into seven distinct classes. The model includes a feature extraction module that derives multi-level representations of the lesions, a feature fusion attention module to integrate contextual information from the various sequences, and an attention-guided data augmentation module to enrich the training dataset. The proposed model achieved a patient-wise classification accuracy of 0.9302 and a lesion-wise accuracy of 0.8592, along with an F1-score of 0.8395, a recall of 0.8296, and a precision of 0.8551. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of combining multi-sequence MRI with advanced deep learning methodologies, providing a robust tool to support radiologists in accurately classifying liver lesions in clinical settings.