Fully Automated Delineation of Gross Tumor Volume for Head and Neck Cancer on PET-CT Using Deep Learning: A Dual-Center Study

Abstract EN

Purpose.

In this study, we proposed an automated deep learning (DL) method for head and neck cancer (HNC) gross tumor volume (GTV) contouring on positron emission tomography-computed tomography (PET-CT) images.

Materials and Methods.

PET-CT images were collected from 22 newly diagnosed HNC patients, of whom 17 (Database 1) and 5 (Database 2) were from two centers, respectively.

An oncologist and a radiologist decided the gold standard of GTV manually by consensus.

We developed a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) and trained the network based on the two-dimensional PET-CT images and the gold standard of GTV in the training dataset.

We did two experiments: Experiment 1, with Database 1 only, and Experiment 2, with both Databases 1 and 2.

In both Experiment 1 and Experiment 2, we evaluated the proposed method using a leave-one-out cross-validation strategy.

We compared the median results in Experiment 2 (GTVa) with the performance of other methods in the literature and with the gold standard (GTVm).

Results.

A tumor segmentation task for a patient on coregistered PET-CT images took less than one minute.

The dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of the proposed method in Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 was 0.481∼0.872 and 0.482∼0.868, respectively.

The DSC of GTVa was better than that in previous studies.

A high correlation was found between GTVa and GTVm (R = 0.99, P<0.001).

The median volume difference (%) between GTVm and GTVa was 10.9%.

The median values of DSC, sensitivity, and precision of GTVa were 0.785, 0.764, and 0.789, respectively.

Conclusion.

A fully automatic GTV contouring method for HNC based on DCNN and PET-CT from dual centers has been successfully proposed with high accuracy and efficiency.

Our proposed method is of help to the clinicians in HNC management.