Early-fusion hybrid CNN-transformer models for multiclass ovarian tumor ultrasound classification
Ovarian cancer remains the deadliest gynecologic malignancy, and transvaginal ultrasound (TVS), the first-line test, still suffers from limited specificity and operator dependence. We introduce a learned early-fusion (joint projection) hybrid that couples EfficientNet-B7 (local descriptors) with a S...
| Autores: | , , , |
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2025 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universidad Católica San Antonio de Murcia (UCAM) |
| Repositorio: | RIUCAM. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad Católica San Antonio de Murcia |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:repositorio.ucam.edu:10952/10524 |
| Acceso en línea: | http://hdl.handle.net/10952/10524 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Ovarian cancer Ultrasound imaging Deep learning CNN Vision transformer Hybrid model Early diagnosis |
| Sumario: | Ovarian cancer remains the deadliest gynecologic malignancy, and transvaginal ultrasound (TVS), the first-line test, still suffers from limited specificity and operator dependence. We introduce a learned early-fusion (joint projection) hybrid that couples EfficientNet-B7 (local descriptors) with a Swin Transformer (hierarchical global context) to classify eight ovarian tumor categories from 2D TVS. Using the public, de-identified OTU-2D dataset (n = 1,469 images across eight histopathologic classes), we conducted patient-level, stratified 5-fold cross-validation repeated 10×. To address class imbalance while preventing leakage, training used train-only oversampling, ultrasound-aware augmentations, and strong regularization; validation/test folds were never resampled. The hybrid achieved AUC 0.9904, accuracy 92.13%, sensitivity 92.38%, and specificity 98.90%, outperforming single CNN or ViT baselines. A soft ensemble of the top hybrids further improved performance to AUC 0.991, accuracy 93.3%, sensitivity 93.6%, and specificity 99.0%. Beyond discrimination, we provide deployment-oriented evaluation: isotonic calibration yielded reliable probabilities, decision-curve analysis showed net clinical benefit across 5–20% risk thresholds, entropy-based uncertainty supported confidencebased triage, and Grad-CAM highlighted clinically salient regions. All metrics are reported with 95% bootstrap confidence intervals, and the evaluation protocol preserves real-world data distributions. Taken together, this work advances ovarian ultrasound AI from accuracy-only reporting to calibrated, explainable, and uncertainty-aware decision support, offering a reproducible reference framework for multiclass ovarian ultrasound and a clear path toward clinical integration and prospective validation. |
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