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Integrating Mechanistic Knowledge into Deep Learning for Improved Cancer Detection

Authors
Affiliations
Stanford University
University of Pennsylvania
Stanford University
University of Pennsylvania
Stanford University
Stanford University
Harvard University
Stanford University
Stanford University

Deep learning requires large amounts of data. The ever-growing demand for more data represents a significant bottleneck. Many proposed solutions use AI based synthetic data to augment existing data, however these approaches have marked limitations. Here, we use mechanistic understanding of the human body to integrate physics-based models into a deep-learning model for lung tumor segmentation. We simulate lung deformation according to a natural breathing cycle using a finite element analysis of hyper elasticity with computed tomography (CT) of the chest from the publicly available LOTUS dataset (300 lung CTs) to increase the variation of existing data. This approach extends beyond current methods for data augmentation that are often based on simple spatial transformations (rotation, flipping, translation, and shear). Ultimately this approach serves as a case study of methods to integrate a-priori knowledge with AI.

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