利用解剖对称性差异,自动分割鼻咽癌放疗计划CT中的肿瘤区域。
Leveraging Semantic Asymmetry for Precise Gross Tumor Volume Segmentation of Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma in Planning CT
- 基于双侧解剖对称性破坏设计对比学习框架
- 外部测试中骰子系数提升至少2%,平均距离误差降低12%
- 适合放疗自动化与医学影像智能分割研究者
在鼻咽癌放疗中,临床通常使用非增强放疗计划CT勾画大体肿瘤体积(GTV),以确保精准照射。然而,肿瘤与周围正常组织对比度低,常需依赖诊断MRI辅助人工勾画,存在图像配准误差风险。本文提出一种3D语义不对称肿瘤分割方法(SATs),利用健康鼻咽部天然双侧对称性,而肿瘤出现后会破坏这种对称性。通过构建孪生对比学习框架,最小化无肿瘤区域原图与翻转图的体素级距离,同时增大有肿瘤区域的对应距离,从而增强模型对语义不对称性的敏感度。大量实验表明,该方法在内部和外部测试中均达到领先性能,例如在外部测试中,相比其他先进方法,骰子系数至少提升2%,平均距离误差降低12%。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
In the radiation therapy of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC), clinicians typically delineate the gross tumor volume (GTV) using non-contrast planning computed tomography to ensure accurate radiation dose delivery. However, the low contrast between tumors and adjacent normal tissues necessitates that radiation oncologists manually delineate the tumors, often relying on diagnostic MRI for guidance. % In this study, we propose a novel approach to directly segment NPC gross tumors on non-contrast planning CT images, circumventing potential registration errors when aligning MRI or MRI-derived tumor masks to planning CT. To address the low contrast issues between tumors and adjacent normal structures in planning CT, we introduce a 3D Semantic Asymmetry Tumor segmentation (SATs) method. Specifically, we posit that a healthy nasopharyngeal region is characteristically bilaterally symmetric, whereas the emergence of nasopharyngeal carcinoma disrupts this symmetry. Then, we propose a Siamese contrastive learning segmentation framework that minimizes the voxel-wise distance between original and flipped areas without tumor and encourages a larger distance between original and flipped areas with tumor. Thus, our approach enhances the sensitivity of features to semantic asymmetries. % Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed SATs achieves the leading NPC GTV segmentation performance in both internal and external testing, \emph{e.g.}, with at least 2\% absolute Dice score improvement and 12\% average distance error reduction when compared to other state-of-the-art methods in the external testing.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。