OARnet: Automated organs-at-risk delineation in Head and Neck CT images
This work addresses the problem of automating time-consuming manual delineation for radiotherapy planning in medical imaging, representing an incremental improvement over prior deep learning methods.
The paper tackles automated delineation of organs-at-risk in Head and Neck CT images using a 3D deep learning model called OARnet, which improves accuracy over existing methods, with median Dice similarity coefficient gains up to 0.17 and Hausdorff distance reductions up to 6.3mm.
A 3D deep learning model (OARnet) is developed and used to delineate 28 H&N OARs on CT images. OARnet utilizes a densely connected network to detect the OAR bounding-box, then delineates the OAR within the box. It reuses information from any layer to subsequent layers and uses skip connections to combine information from different dense block levels to progressively improve delineation accuracy. Training uses up to 28 expert manual delineated (MD) OARs from 165 CTs. Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and the 95th percentile Hausdorff distance (HD95) with respect to MD is assessed for 70 other CTs. Mean, maximum, and root-mean-square dose differences with respect to MD are assessed for 56 of the 70 CTs. OARnet is compared with UaNet, AnatomyNet, and Multi-Atlas Segmentation (MAS). Wilcoxon signed-rank tests using 95% confidence intervals are used to assess significance. Wilcoxon signed ranked tests show that, compared with UaNet, OARnet improves (p<0.05) the DSC (23/28 OARs) and HD95 (17/28). OARnet outperforms both AnatomyNet and MAS for DSC (28/28) and HD95 (27/28). Compared with UaNet, OARnet improves median DSC up to 0.05 and HD95 up to 1.5mm. Compared with AnatomyNet and MAS, OARnet improves median (DSC, HD95) by up to (0.08, 2.7mm) and (0.17, 6.3mm). Dosimetrically, OARnet outperforms UaNet (Dmax 7/28; Dmean 10/28), AnatomyNet (Dmax 21/28; Dmean 24/28), and MAS (Dmax 22/28; Dmean 21/28). The DenseNet architecture is optimized using a hybrid approach that performs OAR-specific bounding box detection followed by feature recognition. Compared with other auto-delineation methods, OARnet is better than or equal to UaNet for all but one geometric (Temporal Lobe L, HD95) and one dosimetric (Eye L, mean dose) endpoint for the 28 H&N OARs, and is better than or equal to both AnatomyNet and MAS for all OARs.