YANG Anning,LU Na,JIANG Huayong,CHEN Diandian,YU Yanjun,WANG Yadi,Wang Qiusheng,Zhang Fuli. Automatic delineation of organs at risk in non-small cell lung cancer radiotherapy based on deep learning networks. Oncol Transl Med, 2022, 8: 83-88.
Automatic delineation of organs at risk in non-small cell lung cancer radiotherapy based on deep learning networks
Received:January 15, 2022  Revised:April 19, 2022
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KeyWord:non-small cell lung cancer; organs at risk; medical image segmentation; deep learning; DenseNet
Author NameAffiliationPostcode
YANG Anning School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering,Beihang University 100191
LU Na Radiation Oncology Department,the Seventh Medical Center of Chinese PLA General Hospital 
JIANG Huayong Radiation Oncology Department,the Seventh Medical Center of Chinese PLA General Hospital 
CHEN Diandian Radiation Oncology Department,the Seventh Medical Center of Chinese PLA General Hospital 
YU Yanjun Radiation Oncology Department,the Seventh Medical Center of Chinese PLA General Hospital 
WANG Yadi Radiation Oncology Department,the Seventh Medical Center of Chinese PLA General Hospital 
Wang Qiusheng School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering,Beihang University 
Zhang Fuli Radiation Oncology Department,the Seventh Medical Center of Chinese PLA General Hospital 100700
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Abstract:
      Objective To introduce an end-to-end automatic segmentation method for organs at risk (OARs) in chest computed tomography (CT) images based on dense connection deep learning and to provide an accurate auto-segmentation model to reduce the workload on radiation oncologists. Methods CT images of 36 lung cancer cases were included in this study. Of these, 27 cases were randomly selected as the training set, six cases as the validation set, and nine cases as the testing set. The left and right lungs, cord, and heart were auto-segmented, and the training time was set to approximately 5 h. The testing set was evaluated using geometric metrics including the Dice similarity coefficient (DSC), 95% Hausdorff distance (HD95), and average surface distance (ASD). Thereafter, two sets of treatment plans were optimized based on manually contoured OARs and automatically contoured OARs, respectively. Dosimetric parameters including Dmax and Vx of the OARs were obtained and compared. Results The proposed model was superior to U-Net in terms of the DSC, HD95, and ASD, although there was no significant difference in the segmentation results yielded by both networks (P > 0.05). Compared to manual segmentation, auto-segmentation significantly reduced the segmentation time by nearly 40.7% (P < 0.05). Moreover, the differences in dose-volume parameters between the two sets of plans were not statistically significant (P > 0.05). Conclusion The bilateral lung, cord, and heart could be accurately delineated using the DenseNetbased deep learning method. Thus, feature map reuse can be a novel approach to medical image autosegmentation .
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