Overview of the HECKTOR Challenge at MICCAI 2021: Automatic Head and Neck Tumor Segmentation and Outcome Prediction in PET/CT Images
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）
Vincent Andrearczyk, Valentin Oreiller, Sarah Boughdad, Catherine Chez Le Rest, Hesham Elhalawani, Mario Jreige, John O. Prior, Martin Vallières, Dimitris Visvi… 展开作者
Vincent Andrearczyk, Valentin Oreiller, Sarah Boughdad, Catherine Chez Le Rest, Hesham Elhalawani, Mario Jreige, John O. Prior, Martin Vallières, Dimitris Visvikis, Mathieu Hatt, Adrien Depeursinge
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 same FDG-PET/CT. Finally, Task 3 is the same as Task 2 with ground truth GTVt annotations provided to the participants. The data were collected from six centers for a total of 325 images, split into 224 training and 101 testing cases. The interest in the challenge was highlighted by the important participation with 103 registered teams and 448 result submissions. The best methods obtained a Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 0.7591 in the first task, and a Concordance index (C-index) of 0.7196 and 0.6978 in Tasks 2 and 3, respectively. In all tasks, simplicity of the approach was found to be key to ensure generalization performance. The comparison of the PFS prediction performance in Tasks 2 and 3 suggests that providing the GTVt contour was not crucial to achieve best results, which indicates that fully automatic methods can be used. This potentially obviates the need for GTVt contouring, opening avenues for reproducible and large scale radiomics studies including thousands potential subjects.
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…
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…
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…
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 …
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）
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…
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 …
Comparative Analysis of nnUNet and MedNeXt for Head and Neck Tumor Segmentation in MRI-guided Radiotherapy
Sharif University of Technology（谢里夫理工大学）；Institute for AI in Medicine (IKIM), University Medicine Essen（埃森大学医学中心人工智能医学研究所）；Center Algoritmi / LASI, University of Minho（米尼奥大学Algoritmi中心/LASI）；University Hospital RWTH Aachen（亚琛工业大学附属医院）；Cancer Research Center Cologne Essen (CCCE), University Medicine Essen (AöR)（埃森大学医学中心（公法团体）科隆埃森癌症研究中心）；German Cancer Consortium (DKTK), Partner Site Essen（德国癌症联盟埃森合作站点）；TU Dortmund University（多特蒙德工业大学）
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 …
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…
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）
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…
Cancer Hospital of University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Zhejiang Cancer Hospital)（中国科学院大学附属肿瘤医院（浙江省肿瘤医院））；Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）
Radiotherapy is a treatment where radiation is used to eliminate cancer cells. The delineation of organs-at-risk (OARs) is a vital step in radiotherapy treatment planning to avoid damage to healthy organs. For nasopharyngeal cancer, more than 20 OARs are needed to be precisely segmented in advance. The challenge of this task lies in complex anatomical structure, low-contrast organ contours, and the extremely imbalanced size between large and small organs. Common segmentation methods that treat them equally would generally lead to inaccurate small-organ labeling. We propose a novel two-stage de…
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…
SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Shenzhen Yino Intelligence Techonology（深圳依诺智能科技）；Inst. of Cancer Research & Basic Medical Sciences of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院肿瘤与基础医学研究所）；Cancer Hospital of University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学附属肿瘤医院）；Zhejiang Cancer Hospital（浙江省肿瘤医院）
In this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep neural network for solving the problem of imbalanced large and small organ segmentation in head and neck (HaN) CT images. To conduct radiotherapy planning for nasopharyngeal cancer, more than 10 organs-at-risk (normal organs) need to be precisely segmented in advance. However, the size ratio between large and small organs in the head could reach hundreds. Directly using such imbalanced organ annotations to train deep neural networks generally leads to inaccurate small-organ label maps. We propose a novel end-to-end deep neural network to solve this …
Emory University（埃默里大学）；Winship Cancer Institute（温希普癌症研究所）
This paper presents a review of deep learning (DL) in multi-organ segmentation. We summarized the latest DL-based methods for medical image segmentation and applications. These methods were classified into six categories according to their network design. For each category, we listed the surveyed works, highlighted important contributions and identified specific challenges. Following the detailed review of each category, we briefly discussed its achievements, shortcomings and future potentials. We provided a comprehensive comparison among DL-based methods for thoracic and head & neck multiorga…
Leiden University Medical Center（莱顿大学医学中心）；TU Delft（代尔夫特理工大学）
Deep learning models for organ contouring in radiotherapy are poised for clinical usage, but currently, there exist few tools for automated quality assessment (QA) of the predicted contours. Using Bayesian models and their associated uncertainty, one can potentially automate the process of detecting inaccurate predictions. We investigate two Bayesian models for auto-contouring, DropOut and FlipOut, using a quantitative measure - expected calibration error (ECE) and a qualitative measure - region-based accuracy-vs-uncertainty (R-AvU) graphs. It is well understood that a model should have low EC…
Shanghai AI Lab（上海人工智能实验室）；Shenzhen Yino Intelligence Techonology Co., Ltd.（深圳一诺智能科技有限公司）；Shenying Medical Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd.（深盈医疗科技（深圳）有限公司）；School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学生物医学工程学院）；Institute of Medical Robotics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学医疗机器人研究所）；Shenzhen Key Lab of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, SIAT-SenseTime Joint Lab, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院深圳计算机视觉与模式识别重点实验室、SIAT-商汤联合实验室）；Paul C. Lauterbur Research Center for Biomedical Imaging, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院保罗·C·劳特伯生物医学成像研究中心）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Pazhou Lab（琶洲实验室）；Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；SIAT-SenseTime Joint Lab（SIAT-商汤联合实验室）；Shenzhen Key Lab of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition（深圳计算机视觉与模式识别重点实验室）
Radiation therapy (RT) is widely employed in the clinic for the treatment of head and neck (HaN) cancers. An essential step of RT planning is the accurate segmentation of various organs-at-risks (OARs) in HaN CT images. Nevertheless, segmenting OARs manually is time-consuming, tedious, and error-prone considering that typical HaN CT images contain tens to hundreds of slices. Automated segmentation algorithms are urgently required. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been extensively investigated on this task. Particularly, 3D CNNs are frequently adopted to process 3D HaN CT ima…
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…
