AI-enhanced prostate MRI: unveiling unreported prostate incidental findings through routine screening for prostate cancer
Author Block: D. Skwierawska1, S. Heidarikahkesh1, D. Bounias2, R. J. Jóźwiak3, D. Hadler1, M. Bachl1, M. Uder1, F. B. Laun1, S. Bickelhaupt1; 1Erlangen/DE, 2Heidelberg/DE, 3Warsaw/PL
Purpose: To evaluate the feasibility of automated detection and segmentation of incidental findings in prostate MRI.
Methods or Background: This IRB-approved, retrospective study included n=425 prostate MRI examinations (1.5T and 3.0T), comprising n=306 internal cases from our institution and n=119 external cases from three independent datasets. Manual segmentations were performed for sigmoid diverticulosis (SD), perirectal lymph nodes (PLN), urinary bladder diverticula (UBD), bladder wall thickenings (BWT), inguinal hernias (IH), degenerative changes of the hip (DC), synovial cysts (SC) and hydrocele testis (HT) on T2-weighted images for n=265 internal cases (n=520 ROIs). An nnU-Net model was trained on n=213 of these cases, and the remaining independent n=52 cases were used for the quantitative evaluation of model performance. Further, n =160 additional examinations (n=41 internal, n=119 from three independent external datasets) were evaluated by a radiologist.
Results or Findings: Segmentation performance varied between the incidental findings. Quantitatively, the highest mean Dice scores were achieved for SD (0.80 ± 0.14), HT (0.76 ± 0.20), and DC (0.70 ± 0.07). Radiologist evaluation across four datasets (one internal and three external) demonstrated accuracies of 0.98/0.77/0.93/0.93 for PLN, 0.98/0.87/0.85/0.88 for SD, 0.93/0.90/0.80/0.88 for IH, and 0.93/0.85/0.76/0.80 for DC, with accuracies for most other incidental findings also exceeding 0.85.
Conclusion: Our method can automatically detect and segment incidental findings in prostate MRI across four independent datasets, demonstrating potential to enhance the efficiency and consistency of reporting, supporting further research with larger, more diverse datasets including additional annotations and targets.
Limitations: The dataset was curated to maximise all targeted findings, and despite reflecting real-world prevalence, it remained imbalanced. Rarer and more subjective findings, such as mild bladder wall thickenings or degenerative changes of the hip, were challenging to annotate due to subtle appearances and patient-specific variations.
Funding for this study: Funding from the Bavarian Academic Center for Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe (BAYHOST) Scholarship, and from the German Research Foundation (DFG; project 500397400) is gratefully acknowledged.
Has your study been approved by an ethics committee? Yes
Ethics committee - additional information: Name of the ethics committee: Ethics committee of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen – Nürnberg, Medizinische Fakultät
Approval Code: 25-67-Br
Approval Date: 25.03.2025