RadHop-Net: A Lightweight Radiomics-to-Error Regression for False Positive Reduction in MRI Prostate Cancer Detection

Clinically significant prostate cancer (csPCa) is a leading cause of cancer death in men, yet it has a high survival rate if diagnosed early. Bi-parametric MRI (bpMRI) reading has become a prominent screening test for csPCa. However, this process has a high false positive (FP) rate, incurring higher diagnostic costs and patient discomfort. This paper introduces RadHop-Net, a novel and lightweight CNN for FP reduction. The pipeline consists of two stages: Stage 1 employs data-driven radiomics to extract candidate ROIs. In contrast, Stage 2 expands the receptive field about each ROI using RadHop-Net to compensate for the predicted error from Stage 1. Moreover, a novel loss function for regression problems is introduced to balance the influence between FPs and true positives (TPs). RadHop-Net is trained in a radiomics-to-error manner, thus decoupling from the common voxel-to-label approach. The proposed Stage 2 improves the average precision (AP) in lesion detection from 0.407 to 0.468 in the publicly available PI-CAI dataset, also maintaining a significantly smaller model size than the state-of-the-art.