Pathologic complete response prediction in breast cancer lesion segmentation and neoadjuvant therapy

Objectives: Predicting whether axillary lymph nodes could achieve pathologic Complete Response (pCR) after breast cancer patients receive neoadjuvant chemotherapy helps make a quick follow-up treatment plan. This paper presents a novel method to achieve this prediction with the most effective medical imaging method, Dynamic Contrast-enhanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging (DCE-MRI).Methods: In order to get an accurate prediction, we first proposed a two-step lesion segmentation method to extract the breast cancer lesion region from DCE-MRI images. With the segmented breast cancer lesion region, we then used a multi-modal fusion model to predict the probability of axillary lymph nodes achieving pCR.Results: We collected 361 breast cancer samples from two hospitals to train and test the proposed segmentation model and the multi-modal fusion model. Both segmentation and prediction models obtained high accuracy.Conclusion: The results show that our method is effective in both the segmentation task and the pCR prediction task. It suggests that the presented methods, especially the multi-modal fusion model, can be used for the prediction of treatment response in breast cancer, given data from noninvasive methods only.