OCIF: automatically learning the optimized clinical information fusion method for computer-aided diagnosis tasks.

PURPOSE: In computer-aided diagnosis, the fusion of image features extracted from neural networks and clinical information is crucial to improve diagnostic accuracy. How to integrate low-dimensional clinical information (LDCF) with high-dimensional network features (HDNF) is an urgent problem to be solved. We offer a new network search framework to address this problem, which can provide optimized LDCF fusion and efficient dimensionality reduction in HDNF.

METHODS: OCIF innovatively uses Gaussian process optimization to explore the search space for the number of fully connected (FC) layers, the number of neurons in each FC layer, the activation function, the dropout factor, and whether to add clinical information to each FC layer. Moreover, OCIF employs transfer learning to reduce the training parameter space and improve search efficiency. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed OCIF, we utilized three popular end-to-end overall survival (OS) time prediction models to predict the three classes.

RESULTS: Our experimental results show that applying OCIF to a classical computer-aided diagnosis neural network can improve classification accuracy. Experiments on the 2020 BRATS dataset prove that OCIF achieves satisfactory performance, with an accuracy of 0.684, precision of 0.735, recall of 0.684, and F1-score of 0.675 on the OS time prediction task.

CONCLUSION: OCIF effectively and creatively combines clinical information and network features, leveraging both clinical information and image features to enhance the accuracy of the final diagnosis. Our experiments demonstrate that the use of OCIF can significantly improve computer-aided diagnosis accuracy, and the approach has the potential to be extended to other medical classification tasks as well.