Transfer learning of pre-treatment quantitative ultrasound multi-parametric images for the prediction of breast cancer response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Locally advanced breast cancer (LABC) is a severe type of cancer with a poor prognosis, despite advancements in therapy. As the disease is often inoperable, current guidelines suggest upfront aggressive neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC). Complete pathological response to chemotherapy is linked to improved survival, but conventional clinical assessments like physical exams, mammography, and imaging are limited in detecting early response. Early detection of tissue response can improve complete pathological response and patient survival while reducing exposure to ineffective and potentially harmful treatments. A rapid, cost-effective modality without the need for exogenous contrast agents would be valuable for evaluating neoadjuvant therapy response. Conventional ultrasound provides information about tissue echogenicity, but image comparisons are difficult due to instrument-dependent settings and imaging parameters. Quantitative ultrasound (QUS) overcomes this by using normalized power spectra to calculate quantitative metrics. This study used a novel transfer learning-based approach to predict LABC response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy using QUS imaging at pre-treatment. Using data from 174 patients, QUS parametric images of breast tumors with margins were generated. The ground truth response to therapy for each patient was based on standard clinical and pathological criteria. The Residual Network (ResNet) deep learning architecture was used to extract features from the parametric QUS maps. This was followed by SelectKBest and Synthetic Minority Oversampling (SMOTE) techniques for feature selection and data balancing, respectively. The Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm was employed to classify patients into two distinct categories: nonresponders (NR) and responders (RR). Evaluation results on an unseen test set demonstrate that the transfer learning-based approach using spectral slope parametric maps had the best performance in the identification of nonresponders with precision, recall, F1-score, and balanced accuracy of 100, 71, 83, and 86%, respectively. The transfer learning-based approach has many advantages over conventional deep learning methods since it reduces the need for large image datasets for training and shortens the training time. The results of this study demonstrate the potential of transfer learning in predicting LABC response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy before the start of treatment using quantitative ultrasound imaging. Prediction of NAC response before treatment can aid clinicians in customizing ineffectual treatment regimens for individual patients.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".