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 using a 2D model, analyzing every slice as a standalone image. In addition, we were interested in understanding how different modalities influence the results. We proposed two approaches; one using only the CT scans to make predictions and another using a combination of the CT and PET scans. For Task 2, the prediction of recurrence-free survival, we first proposed two approaches, one where we only use patient data and one where we combined the patient data with segmentations from the image model. For the prediction of the first two approaches, we used Random Forest. In our third approach, we combined patient data and image data using XGBoost. Low kidney function might worsen cancer prognosis. In this approach, we therefore estimated the kidney function of the patients and included it as a feature. Overall, we conclude that our simple methods were not able to compete with the highest-ranking submissions, but we still obtained reasonably good scores. We also got interesting insights into how the combination of different modalities can influence the segmentation and predictions.
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…
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…
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…
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 …
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 …
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…
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）
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…
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…
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）
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…
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…
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…
