An automatic segmentation algorithm for delineation of the gross tumour volume and pathologic lymph nodes of head and neck cancers in PET/CT images is described. The proposed algorithm is based on a convolutional neural network using the U-Net architecture. Several model hyperparameters were explored and the model performance in terms of the Dice similarity coefficient was validated on images from 15 patients. A separate test set consisting of images from 40 patients was used to assess the generalisability of the algorithm. The performance on the test set showed close-to-oncologist level delineations as measured by the Dice coefficient (CT: $0.65 \pm 0.17$, PET: $0.71 \pm 0.12$, PET/CT: $0.75 \pm 0.12$).
University of Warwick（华威大学）；Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital Research Centre（肖卡特·汗姆纪念癌症医院研究中心）；University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）；Newcastle University（纽卡斯尔大学）；University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）；The Alan Turing Institute（阿兰·图灵研究所）；University Hospitals Coventry & Warwickshire NHS Trust（考文垂与华威郡大学医院NHS信托）
The infiltration of T-lymphocytes in the stroma and tumour is an indication of an effective immune response against the tumour, resulting in better survival. In this study, our aim is to explore the prognostic significance of tumour-associated stroma infiltrating lymphocytes (TASILs) in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) through an AI based automated method. A deep learning based automated method was employed to segment tumour, stroma and lymphocytes in digitally scanned whole slide images of HNSCC tissue slides. The spatial patterns of lymphocytes and tumour-associated stroma were …
Head and neck tumor segmentation challenge (HECKTOR) 2022 offers a platform for researchers to compare their solutions to segmentation of tumors and lymph nodes from 3D CT and PET images. In this work, we describe our solution to HECKTOR 2022 segmentation task. We re-sample all images to a common resolution, crop around head and neck region, and train SegResNet semantic segmentation network from MONAI. We use 5-fold cross validation to select best model checkpoints. The final submission is an ensemble of 15 models from 3 runs. Our solution (team name NVAUTO) achieves the 1st place on the HECKT…
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Nanjing University（南京大学）
Automatic segmentation of head and neck tumors plays an important role in radiomics analysis. In this short paper, we propose an automatic segmentation method for head and neck tumors from PET and CT images based on the combination of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and hybrid active contours. Specifically, we first introduce a multi-channel 3D U-Net to segment the tumor with the concatenated PET and CT images. Then, we estimate the segmentation uncertainty by model ensembles and define a segmentation quality score to select the cases with high uncertainties. Finally, we develop a hybrid …
University of British Columbia Data Science Institute（不列颠哥伦比亚大学数据科学研究所）；BC Cancer Research Institute（不列颠哥伦比亚省癌症研究所）；University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）
Training computer-vision related algorithms on medical images for disease diagnosis or image segmentation is difficult due to the lack of training data, labeled samples, and privacy concerns. For this reason, a robust generative method to create synthetic data is highly sought after. However, most three-dimensional image generators require additional image input or are extremely memory intensive. To address these issues we propose adapting video generation techniques for 3-D image generation. Using the temporal GAN (TGAN) architecture, we show we are able to generate realistic head and neck PE…
LaTIM, INSERM, UMR 1101, University Brest（拉蒂姆研究所、法国国家健康与医学研究院、布雷斯特大学）
Development of robust and accurate fully automated methods for medical image segmentation is crucial in clinical practice and radiomics studies. In this work, we contributed an automated approach for Head and Neck (H&N) primary tumor segmentation in combined positron emission tomography / computed tomography (PET/CT) images in the context of the MICCAI 2020 Head and Neck Tumor segmentation challenge (HECKTOR). Our model was designed on the U-Net architecture with residual layers and supplemented with Squeeze-and-Excitation Normalization. The described method achieved competitive results in cro…
University of Freiburg（弗莱堡大学）；Medical Center – University of Freiburg（弗莱堡大学医学中心）；Faculty of Medicine, University of Freiburg（弗莱堡大学医学院）；German Cancer Consortium (DKTK)（德国癌症联盟）；Medical School of Nanjing University（南京大学医学院）；Affiliated Drum Tower Hospital（鼓楼医院）；Hannover Medical School（汉诺威医学院）；Institute for Surgical Pathology, Medical Center – University of Freiburg（弗莱堡大学医学中心外科病理研究所）
Accurate delineation of the intraprostatic gross tumour volume (GTV) is a prerequisite for treatment approaches in patients with primary prostate cancer (PCa). Prostate-specific membrane antigen positron emission tomography (PSMA-PET) may outperform MRI in GTV detection. However, visual GTV delineation underlies interobserver heterogeneity and is time consuming. The aim of this study was to develop a convolutional neural network (CNN) for automated segmentation of intraprostatic tumour (GTV-CNN) in PSMA-PET. Methods: The CNN (3D U-Net) was trained on [68Ga]PSMA-PET images of 152 patients from …
Segmentation of head and neck (H\&N) tumours and prediction of patient outcome are crucial for patient's disease diagnosis and treatment monitoring. Current developments of robust deep learning models are hindered by the lack of large multi-centre, multi-modal data with quality annotations. The MICCAI 2021 HEad and neCK TumOR (HECKTOR) segmentation and outcome prediction challenge creates a platform for comparing segmentation methods of the primary gross target volume on fluoro-deoxyglucose (FDG)-PET and Computed Tomography images and prediction of progression-free survival in H\&N oropharynge…
Recent works have demonstrated the added value of dynamic amino acid positron emission tomography (PET) for glioma grading and genotyping, biopsy targeting, and recurrence diagnosis. However, most of these studies are exclusively based on hand-crafted qualitative or semi-quantitative dynamic features extracted from the mean time activity curve (TAC) within predefined volumes. Voxelwise dynamic PET data analysis could instead provide a better insight into intra-tumour heterogeneity of gliomas. In this work, we investigate the ability of the widely used principal component analysis (PCA) method …
HES-SO Valais-Wallis University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland（瑞士西部应用科学与艺术大学瓦莱州分校）；Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV)（沃州大学中心医院）；Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Poitiers (CHUP)（普瓦捷大学中心医院）；Univ Brest（布雷斯特大学）；INSERM（法国国家健康与医学研究院）；LaTIM（医学信息处理实验室）；Cleveland Clinic Foundation（克利夫兰医学中心基金会）；University of Sherbrooke（舍布鲁克大学）
This paper presents an overview of the second edition of the HEad and neCK TumOR (HECKTOR) challenge, organized as a satellite event of the 24th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) 2021. The challenge is composed of three tasks related to the automatic analysis of PET/CT images for patients with Head and Neck cancer (H&N), focusing on the oropharynx region. Task 1 is the automatic segmentation of H&N primary Gross Tumor Volume (GTVt) in FDG-PET/CT images. Task 2 is the automatic prediction of Progression Free Survival (PFS) from the s…
BC Cancer Research Institute（不列颠哥伦比亚癌症研究所）；University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Simon Fraser University（西蒙弗雷泽大学）
We utilized a 3D nnU-Net model with residual layers supplemented by squeeze and excitation (SE) normalization for tumor segmentation from PET/CT images provided by the Head and Neck Tumor segmentation chal-lenge (HECKTOR). Our proposed loss function incorporates the Unified Fo-cal and Mumford-Shah losses to take the advantage of distribution, region, and boundary-based loss functions. The results of leave-one-out-center-cross-validation performed on different centers showed a segmentation performance of 0.82 average Dice score (DSC) and 3.16 median Hausdorff Distance (HD), and our results on t…
In medical imaging, radiological scans of different modalities serve to enhance different sets of features for clinical diagnosis and treatment planning. This variety enriches the source information that could be used for outcome prediction. Deep learning methods are particularly well-suited for feature extraction from high-dimensional inputs such as images. In this work, we apply a CNN classification network augmented with a FCN preprocessor sub-network to a public TCIA head and neck cancer dataset. The training goal is survival prediction of radiotherapy cases based on pre-treatment FDG PET-…
SwinCross: Cross-modal Swin Transformer for Head-and-Neck Tumor Segmentation in PET/CT Images
Philips Research North America（飞利浦北美研究院）；Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School（麻省总医院/哈佛医学院）；The Center for Advanced Medical Computing and Analysis, Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School（麻省总医院/哈佛医学院高级医学计算与分析中心）
Southern Medical University（南方医科大学）；LaTIM（拉蒂姆实验室）；INSERM（法国国家健康与医学研究院）；Univ Brest（布雷斯特大学）；Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College（中国医学科学院北京协和医学院）
Automatic segmentation of head and neck cancer (HNC) tumors and lymph nodes plays a crucial role in the optimization treatment strategy and prognosis analysis. This study aims to employ nnU-Net for automatic segmentation and radiomics for recurrence-free survival (RFS) prediction using pretreatment PET/CT images in multi-center HNC cohort. A multi-center HNC dataset with 883 patients (524 patients for training, 359 for testing) was provided in HECKTOR 2022. A bounding box of the extended oropharyngeal region was retrieved for each patient with fixed size of 224 x 224 x 224 $mm^{3}$. Then 3D nn…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Princess Margaret Cancer Centre（玛格丽特公主癌症中心）；TECHNA Institute（TECHNA研究所）
Accurate prognosis for an individual patient is a key component of precision oncology. Recent advances in machine learning have enabled the development of models using a wider range of data, including imaging. Radiomics aims to extract quantitative predictive and prognostic biomarkers from routine medical imaging, but evidence for computed tomography radiomics for prognosis remains inconclusive. We have conducted an institutional machine learning challenge to develop an accurate model for overall survival prediction in head and neck cancer using clinical data etxracted from electronic medical …
Merging-Diverging Hybrid Transformer Networks for Survival Prediction in Head and Neck Cancer
School of Computer Science, The University of Sydney（悉尼大学计算机科学学院）；Institute of Translational Medicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学转化医学研究院）；Royal Prince Alfred Hospital（皇家阿尔弗雷德王子医院）；Med-X Research Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学Med-X研究院）
Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Accurate prognosis of a tumor can help doctors provide a proper course of treatment and, therefore, save the lives of many. Traditional machine learning algorithms have been eminently useful in crafting prognostic models in the last few decades. Recently, deep learning algorithms have shown significant improvement when developing diagnosis and prognosis solutions to different healthcare problems. However, most of these solutions rely solely on either imaging or clinical data. Utilizing patient tabular data such as demographics and patient medical history alongside imaging data in a multimodal …
SimulaMet（SimulaMet研究院）；Oslo Metropolitan University（奥斯陆城市大学）；UiT The Arctic University of Norway（挪威北极大学）
Head and neck cancers are the fifth most common cancer worldwide, and recently, analysis of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and Computed Tomography (CT) images has been proposed to identify patients with a prognosis. Even though the results look promising, more research is needed to further validate and improve the results. This paper presents the work done by team MLC for the 2022 version of the HECKTOR grand challenge held at MICCAI 2022. For Task 1, the automatic segmentation task, our approach was, in contrast to earlier solutions using 3D segmentation, to keep it as simple as possible …
The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
Outcome prediction is crucial for head and neck cancer patients as it can provide prognostic information for early treatment planning. Radiomics methods have been widely used for outcome prediction from medical images. However, these methods are limited by their reliance on intractable manual segmentation of tumor regions. Recently, deep learning methods have been proposed to perform end-to-end outcome prediction so as to remove the reliance on manual segmentation. Unfortunately, without segmentation masks, these methods will take the whole image as input, such that makes them difficult to foc…
Data Science Institute, University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学数据科学研究所）；BC Cancer Research Institute（不列颠哥伦比亚癌症研究所）；University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）
Training computer-vision related algorithms on medical images for disease diagnosis or image segmentation is difficult in large part due to privacy concerns. For this reason, generative image models are highly sought after to facilitate data sharing. However, 3-D generative models are understudied, and investigation of their privacy leakage is needed. We introduce our 3-D generative model, Transversal GAN (TrGAN), using head & neck PET images which are conditioned on tumour masks as a case study. We define quantitative measures of image fidelity, utility and privacy for our model. These metric…
Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide, and head and neck (H&N) cancer is amongst the most prevalent types. Positron emission tomography and computed tomography are used to detect, segment and quantify the tumor region. Clinically, tumor segmentation is extensively time-consuming and prone to error. Machine learning, and deep learning in particular, can assist to automate this process, yielding results as accurate as the results of a clinician. In this paper, we investigate a vision transformer-based method to automatically delineate H&N tumor, and compare its results to leadin…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Shanghai Ninth People’s Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine（上海交通大学医学院附属第九人民医院）；Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center（复旦大学附属肿瘤医院）
Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Tongji Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学同济医学院同济医院）；Shenzhen-Hong Kong Institute of Brain Science-Shenzhen Fundamental Research Institutions（深港脑科学创新研究院——深圳基础研究机构）；United Imaging Research Institute of Innovative Medical Equipment（联影创新医疗装备研究院）；Shenzhen Bay Laboratory（深圳湾实验室）
Achieving accurate and automated tumor segmentation plays an important role in both clinical practice and radiomics research. Segmentation in medicine is now often performed manually by experts, which is a laborious, expensive and error-prone task. Manual annotation relies heavily on the experience and knowledge of these experts. In addition, there is much intra- and interobserver variation. Therefore, it is of great significance to develop a method that can automatically segment tumor target regions. In this paper, we propose a deep learning segmentation method based on multimodal positron em…
GLOW-FDG: Generalized cancer LesiOn Whole-body segmentation model for $^{18}$F-FDG-PET/CT
Department of Radiation Oncology, University Hospital Zurich, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland（苏黎世大学放射肿瘤科，苏黎世大学，苏黎世，瑞士）；Faculty of Medicine, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland（苏黎世大学医学院，苏黎世，瑞士）；Division of Medical Image Computing, German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg, Germany（德国癌症研究中心（DKFZ）医学图像计算部，海德堡，德国）；Department of Radiation Oncology, Institut de Cancérologie de Lorraine, Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy, France（洛林癌症研究所放射肿瘤科，法国 Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy）；Department of Thoracic Surgery, University Hospital Zurich, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland（苏黎世大学胸外科科，苏黎世大学，苏黎世，瑞士）；ETOP IBCSG Partners Foundation, Bern, Switzerland（ETOP IBCSG合作伙伴基金会，瑞士伯恩）；Department of Nuclear Medicine, University Hospital Zurich, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland（苏黎世大学核医学科，苏黎世大学，苏黎世，瑞士）
Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
When oncologists estimate cancer patient survival, they rely on multimodal data. Even though some multimodal deep learning methods have been proposed in the literature, the majority rely on having two or more independent networks that share knowledge at a later stage in the overall model. On the other hand, oncologists do not do this in their analysis but rather fuse the information in their brain from multiple sources such as medical images and patient history. This work proposes a deep learning method that mimics oncologists' analytical behavior when quantifying cancer and estimating patient…
