From Preoperative CT to Postmastoidectomy Mesh Construction:1Mastoidectomy Shape Prediction for Cochlear Implant Surgery
This work addresses a critical need in cochlear implant surgical planning by enabling accurate prediction without human annotations, though it is incremental as it builds on existing deep learning methods for a specific medical domain.
The paper tackles the problem of predicting mastoidectomy shapes from preoperative CT scans for cochlear implant surgery, achieving a mean Dice score of 0.72 with a hybrid self-supervised and weakly-supervised learning framework that surpasses state-of-the-art approaches.
Cochlear Implant (CI) surgery treats severe hearing loss by inserting an electrode array into the cochlea to stimulate the auditory nerve. An important step in this procedure is mastoidectomy, which removes part of the mastoid region of the temporal bone to provide surgical access. Accurate mastoidectomy shape prediction from preoperative imaging improves pre-surgical planning, reduces risks, and enhances surgical outcomes. Despite its importance, there are limited deep-learning-based studies regarding this topic due to the challenges of acquiring ground-truth labels. We address this gap by investigating self-supervised and weakly-supervised learning models to predict the mastoidectomy region without human annotations. We propose a hybrid self-supervised and weakly-supervised learning framework to predict the mastoidectomy region directly from preoperative CT scans, where the mastoid remains intact. Our hybrid method achieves a mean Dice score of 0.72 when predicting the complex and boundary-less mastoidectomy shape, surpassing state-of-the-art approaches and demonstrating strong performance. The method provides groundwork for constructing 3D postmastoidectomy surfaces directly from the corresponding preoperative CT scans. To our knowledge, this is the first work that integrating self-supervised and weakly-supervised learning for mastoidectomy shape prediction, offering a robust and efficient solution for CI surgical planning while leveraging 3D T-distribution loss in weakly-supervised medical imaging.