Tao C, Gu D, Huang R, Zhou L, Hu Z, Chen Y, Zhang X, Li H. Hippocampus segmentation after brain tumor resection via postoperative region synthesis.
BMC Med Imaging 2023;
23:142. [PMID:
37770839 PMCID:
PMC10537466 DOI:
10.1186/s12880-023-01087-2]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/02/2023] [Accepted: 08/21/2023] [Indexed: 09/30/2023] Open
Abstract
PURPOSE
Accurately segmenting the hippocampus is an essential step in brain tumor radiotherapy planning. Some patients undergo brain tumor resection beforehand, which can significantly alter the postoperative regions' appearances and intensity of the 3D MR images. However, there are limited tumor resection patient images for deep neural networks to be effective.
METHODS
We propose a novel automatic hippocampus segmentation framework via postoperative image synthesis. The variational generative adversarial network consists of intensity alignment and a weight-map-guided feature fusion module, which transfers the postoperative regions to the preoperative images. In addition, to further boost the performance of hippocampus segmentation, We design a joint training strategy to optimize the image synthesis network and the segmentation task simultaneously.
RESULTS
Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method on the dataset with 48 nasopharyngeal carcinoma patients and 67 brain tumor patients observes consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods.
CONCLUSION
The proposed postoperative image synthesis method act as a novel and powerful scheme to generate additional training data. Compared with existing deep learning methods, it achieves better accuracy for hippocampus segmentation of brain tumor patients who have undergone brain tumor resection. It can be used as an automatic contouring tool for hippocampus delineation in hippocampus-sparing radiotherapy.
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