{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,28]],"date-time":"2026-04-28T22:20:41Z","timestamp":1777414841653,"version":"3.51.4"},"reference-count":29,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"4","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2025,3,26]],"date-time":"2025-03-26T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1742947200000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"name":"European Union\u2019s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program","award":["952159"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["952159"]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["J. Imaging"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Prostate cancer (PCa) is currently the second most prevalent cancer among men. Accurate diagnosis of PCa can provide effective treatment for patients and reduce mortality. Previous works have merely focused on either lesion detection or lesion classification of PCa from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In this work we focus on a critical, yet underexplored task of the PCa clinical workflow: distinguishing cases with cancer presence (pathologically confirmed PCa patients) from conditions with no suspicious PCa findings (no cancer presence). To this end, we conduct large-scale experiments for this task for the first time by adopting and processing the multi-centric ProstateNET Imaging Archive which contains more than 6 million image representations of PCa from more than 11,000 PCa cases, representing the largest collection of PCa MR images. Bi-parametric MR (bpMRI) images of 4504 patients alongside their clinical variables are used for training, while the architectures are evaluated on two hold-out test sets of 975 retrospective and 435 prospective patients. Our proposed multi-encoder-cross-attention-fusion architecture achieved a promising area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.91. This demonstrates our method\u2019s capability of fusing complex bi-parametric imaging modalities and enhancing model robustness, paving the way towards the clinical adoption of deep learning models for accurately determining the presence of PCa across patient populations.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/jimaging11040098","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,3,28]],"date-time":"2025-03-28T10:54:48Z","timestamp":1743159288000},"page":"98","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":1,"title":["Assessing Cancer Presence in Prostate MRI Using Multi-Encoder Cross-Attention Networks"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"11","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-3667-7051","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Avtantil","family":"Dimitriadis","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (FORTH), N. Plastira 100, Vassilika Vouton, 70013 Heraklion, Greece"},{"name":"Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Universitat de Barcelona, Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 585, L\u2019Eixample, 08007 Barcelona, Spain"},{"name":"Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Hellenic Mediterranean University (HMU), Estavromenos, 71410 Heraklion, Greece"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-2194-7709","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Grigorios","family":"Kalliatakis","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (FORTH), N. Plastira 100, Vassilika Vouton, 70013 Heraklion, Greece"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-1835-8564","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Richard","family":"Osuala","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Universitat de Barcelona, Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 585, L\u2019Eixample, 08007 Barcelona, Spain"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-1813-1039","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Dimitri","family":"Kessler","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Universitat de Barcelona, Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 585, L\u2019Eixample, 08007 Barcelona, Spain"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-6011-4040","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Simone","family":"Mazzetti","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Radiology, Candiolo Cancer Institute\u2013FPO, IRCCS, 10060 Candiolo Torino, Italy"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-8267-5279","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Daniele","family":"Regge","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Radiology, Candiolo Cancer Institute\u2013FPO, IRCCS, 10060 Candiolo Torino, Italy"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-6789-5177","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Oliver","family":"Diaz","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Universitat de Barcelona, Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 585, L\u2019Eixample, 08007 Barcelona, Spain"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-9456-1612","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Karim","family":"Lekadir","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Universitat de Barcelona, Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 585, L\u2019Eixample, 08007 Barcelona, Spain"},{"name":"Instituci\u00f3 Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avan\u00e7ats (ICREA), Passeig Llu\u00eds Companys 23, 08010 Barcelona, Spain"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-9865-0129","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Dimitrios","family":"Fotiadis","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Biomedical Research Institute\u2013FORTH, University Campus of Ioannina, 45110 Ioannina, Greece"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-8454-1450","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Manolis","family":"Tsiknakis","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (FORTH), N. Plastira 100, Vassilika Vouton, 70013 Heraklion, Greece"},{"name":"Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Hellenic Mediterranean University (HMU), Estavromenos, 71410 Heraklion, Greece"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-1028-1016","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Nikolaos","family":"Papanikolaou","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Champalimaud Research, Champalimaud Foundation, 1400-038 Lisbon, Portugal"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"name":"ProCAncer-I Consortium","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-3783-5223","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Kostas","family":"Marias","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (FORTH), N. 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