A stacking ensemble system for identifying the presence of histological variants in bladder carcinoma: a multicenter study

Abstract

Purpose: To create a system to enable the identification of histological variants of bladder cancer in a simple, efficient, and noninvasive manner. Material and methods: In this multicenter diagnostic study, we retrospectively collected basic information and CT images about the patients concerned from three hospitals. An interactive deep learning-based bladder cancer image segmentation framework was constructed using the Swin UNETR algorithm for further features extraction. Radiomic features and deep learning features were extracted for further stacking ensemble system construction. The segmentation model’ performance was assessed by using Dice Similarity (Dice) metrics, Intersection Over Union (IOU), Sensitivity (SEN) and Specificity (SPE). To evaluate the system’s performance, we used the Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) curve, the Accuracy Score (ACC) and Decision Curve Analysis (DCA). Results: 410 patients from one hospital were included in the training set, while 60 patients from two other hospitals were included in the test set. A total of 50 features comprising 46 radiomic features and 4 deep learning features were finally retained for further stacking ensemble model building. The interactive segmentation model and system exhibited excellent performance in both training (Dice = 0.78, IOU = 0.65, SEN = 0.83, SPE = 1.00, AUC = 0.940, ACC = 0.868) and testing datasets (Dice = 0.80, IOU = 0.67, SEN = 0.89, SPE = 1.00, AUC = 0.905, ACC = 0.900). Conclusion: We successfully constructed a stacking ensemble machine learning model for early, non-invasive identification of histological variants in bladder cancer which will help urologists make clinical decisions.