Automatic Phase and Sequence Identification in Gd-EOB-DTPA–Enhanced Liver MRI Using Deep Convolutional and Sequential Learning

The purpose of this study is to develop and validate a deep learning model for automatic identification of acquisition sequences (including T1-weighted sequences with various dynamic contrast-enhanced phases and other auxiliary sequences) in gadolinium ethoxybenzyl diethylenetriamine pentaacetic acid (Gd-EOB-DTPA)-enhanced liver MRI, enabling automated examination-level data curation. This retrospective study included internal Gd-EOB-DTPA-enhanced liver MRI examinations acquired at our institution between June 2018 and May 2020, with independent external test datasets from three additional institutions. Each examination comprised multiple dynamic contrast-enhanced phases and auxiliary sequences, resulting in 13 predefined label categories. A deep learning pipeline was constructed using a convolutional neural network (ConvNeXt) for feature extraction, followed by sequential models (gated recurrent unit [GRU]-based or transformer-based) to model temporal relationships across series. Models were trained using series-level 3D image volumes without reliance on textual Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine metadata. Model selection was performed on a validation set. Performance was evaluated on internal and external test sets using examination-level accuracy, complete-correct rate, and category-level accuracy. Sequential modeling substantially improved performance compared with a convolution-only baseline. The ConvNeXt + GRU model achieved the highest examination-level accuracy and was selected for final evaluation. Dynamic contrast-enhanced phases were identified with high accuracy across datasets. Reduced performance on the external test set was mainly observed for auxiliary sequences with high inter-institutional variability, particularly in T2-weighted imaging. The proposed framework enables accurate automatic identification of dynamic phases and auxiliary sequences in Gd-EOB-DTPA-enhanced liver MRI, supporting robust examination-level data organization in multicenter studies.