通过概率胰腺条件化提升3D胰腺肿瘤分割的跨队列鲁棒性。
PanGuide3D: Cohort-Robust Pancreas Tumor Segmentation via Probabilistic Pancreas Conditioning and a Transformer Bottleneck

- 用概率胰腺图作为多尺度软门控,引导肿瘤分割。
- 在胰腺小病灶和复杂位置上表现更优,假阳性减少。
- 适合临床部署、多中心研究及治疗规划场景。
增强CT中胰腺肿瘤分割具有重要临床意义但技术挑战大:病灶通常微小、异质性强,易与周围组织混淆,且在某一队列上表现良好的模型在队列转移时性能常下降。本文旨在提升跨队列泛化能力的同时保持模型结构简单、高效且适用于3D CT分割。提出PanGuide3D,包含共享3D编码器、预测概率胰腺图的胰腺解码器,以及通过可微软门控在多尺度上显式依赖该胰腺概率的肿瘤解码器。为捕捉分布偏移下的长程上下文,在U-Net瓶颈特征中引入轻量级Transformer瓶颈。通过在PanTS队列训练并在同队列(PanTS)与跨队列(MSD Task07 Pancreas)测试,使用一致预处理与训练协议评估跨队列迁移。评估包含体素级分割指标、患者级肿瘤检出率、按肿瘤大小与解剖位置的子组分析、体积条件性能分析及校准度测量。结果表明,相比基线模型,PanGuide3D在整体肿瘤分割性能上最优,尤其在小肿瘤和难定位区域表现更佳,同时显著降低解剖上不合理的假阳性。这些发现支持概率解剖条件化作为端到端模型提升跨队列鲁棒性的实用策略,并具潜在应用价值于轮廓勾画辅助、治疗规划与多中心研究。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Pancreatic tumor segmentation in contrast-enhanced computed tomography (CT) is clinically important yet technically challenging: lesions are often small, heterogeneous, and easily confused with surrounding soft tissue, and models that perform well on one cohort frequently degrade under cohort shift. Our goal is to improve cross-cohort generalization while keeping the model architecture simple, efficient, and practical for 3D CT segmentation. We introduce PanGuide3D, a cohort-robust architecture with a shared 3D encoder, a pancreas decoder that predicts a probabilistic pancreas map, and a tumor decoder that is explicitly conditioned on this pancreas probability at multiple scales via differentiable soft gating. To capture long-range context under distribution shift, we further add a lightweight Transformer bottleneck in the U-Net bottleneck representation. We evaluate cohort transfer by training on the PanTS (Pancreatic Tumor Segmentation) cohort and testing both in-cohort (PanTS) and out-of-cohort on MSD (Medical Segmentation Decathlon) Task07 Pancreas, using matched preprocessing and training protocols across strong baselines. We collect voxel-level segmentation metrics, patient-level tumor detection, subgroup analyses by tumor size and anatomical location, volume-conditioned performance analyses, and calibration measurements to assess reliability. Across the evaluated models, PanGuide3D achieves the best overall tumor performance and shows improved cross-cohort generalization, particularly for small tumors and challenging anatomical locations, while reducing anatomically implausible false positives. These findings support probabilistic anatomical conditioning as a practical strategy for improving cross-cohort robustness in an end-to-end model and suggest potential utility for contouring support, treatment planning, and multi-institutional studies.
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