MRI-Based Bladder Cancer Staging via YOLOv11 Segmentation and Deep Learning Classification.

BACKGROUND

Accurate staging of bladder cancer is critical for guiding clinical management, particularly the distinction between non-muscle-invasive (T1) and muscle-invasive (T2-T4) disease. Although MRI offers superior soft-tissue contrast, image interpretation remains opera-tor-dependent and subject to inter-observer variability. This study proposes an automated deep learning framework for MRI-based bladder cancer staging to support standardized radio-logical interpretation.

METHODS

A sequential AI-based pipeline was developed, integrating hybrid tumor segmentation using YOLOv11 for lesion detection and DeepLabV3 for boundary refinement, followed by three deep learning classifiers (VGG19, ResNet50, and Vision Transformer) for MRI-based stage prediction. A total of 416 T2-weighted MRI images with radiology-derived stage labels (T1-T4) were included, with data augmentation applied during training. Model performance was evaluated using accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and multi-class AUC. Performance un-certainty was characterized using patient-level bootstrap confidence intervals under a fixed training and evaluation pipeline.

RESULTS

All evaluated models demonstrated high and broadly comparable discriminative performance for MRI-based bladder cancer staging within the present dataset, with high point estimates of accuracy and AUC, particularly for differentiating non-muscle-invasive from muscle-invasive disease. Calibration analysis characterized the probabilistic behavior of predicted stage probabilities under the current experimental setting.

CONCLUSIONS

The proposed framework demonstrates the feasibility of automated MRI-based bladder cancer staging derived from radiological reference labels and supports the potential of deep learning for stand-ardizing and reproducing MRI-based staging procedures. Rather than serving as an independent clinical decision-support system, the framework is intended as a methodological and work-flow-oriented tool for automated staging consistency. Further validation using multi-center datasets, patient-level data splitting prior to augmentation, pathology-confirmed reference stand-ards, and explainable AI techniques is required to establish generalizability and clinical relevance.