Segment Anything Model (SAM) for Radiation Oncology
This work addresses the problem of automating medical image segmentation for radiation oncology, showing incremental progress by applying an existing model to a new domain.
The study evaluated the Segment Anything Model (SAM) for segmenting organs-at-risk in clinical radiotherapy, finding that its 'segment anything' mode achieved Dice scores above 0.7 for most organs, with 'box prompt' mode improving scores by 0.1 to 0.5.
In this study, we evaluate the performance of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) in clinical radiotherapy. Our results indicate that SAM's 'segment anything' mode can achieve clinically acceptable segmentation results in most organs-at-risk (OARs) with Dice scores higher than 0.7. SAM's 'box prompt' mode further improves the Dice scores by 0.1 to 0.5. Considering the size of the organ and the clarity of its boundary, SAM displays better performance for large organs with clear boundaries but performs worse for smaller organs with unclear boundaries. Given that SAM, a model pre-trained purely on natural images, can handle the delineation of OARs from medical images with clinically acceptable accuracy, these results highlight SAM's robust generalization capabilities with consistent accuracy in automatic segmentation for radiotherapy. In other words, SAM can achieve delineation of different OARs at different sites using a generic automatic segmentation model. SAM's generalization capabilities across different disease sites suggest that it is technically feasible to develop a generic model for automatic segmentation in radiotherapy.