Anisotropic Hybrid Networks for liver tumor segmentation with uncertainty quantification
This work addresses the need for automatic tools to reduce time and variability in liver tumor segmentation for medical imaging, but it is incremental as it compares existing methods.
The authors tackled liver and tumor segmentation from MRI by comparing two anisotropic model pipelines and adding uncertainty quantification, finding that both pipelines had different strengths and weaknesses, with results submitted to a MICCAI 2023 challenge.
The burden of liver tumors is important, ranking as the fourth leading cause of cancer mortality. In case of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the delineation of liver and tumor on contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (CE-MRI) is performed to guide the treatment strategy. As this task is time-consuming, needs high expertise and could be subject to inter-observer variability there is a strong need for automatic tools. However, challenges arise from the lack of available training data, as well as the high variability in terms of image resolution and MRI sequence. In this work we propose to compare two different pipelines based on anisotropic models to obtain the segmentation of the liver and tumors. The first pipeline corresponds to a baseline multi-class model that performs the simultaneous segmentation of the liver and tumor classes. In the second approach, we train two distinct binary models, one segmenting the liver only and the other the tumors. Our results show that both pipelines exhibit different strengths and weaknesses. Moreover we propose an uncertainty quantification strategy allowing the identification of potential false positive tumor lesions. Both solutions were submitted to the MICCAI 2023 Atlas challenge regarding liver and tumor segmentation.