Deep learning-based segmentation of multisite disease in ovarian cancer

PurposeTo determine if pelvic/ovarian and omental lesions of ovarian cancer can be reliably segmented on computed tomography (CT) using fully automated deep learning-based methods.MethodsA deep learning model for the two most common disease sites of high-grade serous ovarian cancer lesions (pelvis/ovaries and omentum) was developed and compared against the well-established "no-new-Net" framework and unrevised trainee radiologist segmentations. A total of 451 CT scans collected from four different institutions were used for training (n = 276), evaluation (n = 104) and testing (n = 71) of the methods. The performance was evaluated using the Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and compared using a Wilcoxon test.ResultsOur model outperformed no-new-Net for the pelvic/ovarian lesions in cross-validation, on the evaluation and test set by a significant margin (p values being 4 x 10-7, 3 x 10-4, 4 x 10-2, respectively), and for the omental lesions on the evaluation set (p = 1 x 10-3). Our model did not perform significantly differently in segmenting pelvic/ovarian lesions (p = 0.371) compared to a trainee radiologist. On an independent test set, the model achieved a DSC performance of 71 +/- 20 (mean +/- standard deviation) for pelvic/ovarian and 61 +/- 24 for omental lesions.ConclusionAutomated ovarian cancer segmentation on CT scans using deep neural networks is feasible and achieves performance close to a trainee-level radiologist for pelvic/ovarian lesions.Relevance statementAutomated segmentation of ovarian cancer may be used by clinicians for CT-based volumetric assessments and researchers for building complex analysis pipelines.Key points center dot The first automated approach for pelvic/ovarian and omental ovarian cancer lesion segmentation on CT images has been presented.center dot Automated segmentation of ovarian cancer lesions can be comparable with manual segmentation of trainee radiologists.center dot Careful hyperparameter tuning can provide models significantly outperforming strong state-of-the-art baselines.Key points center dot The first automated approach for pelvic/ovarian and omental ovarian cancer lesion segmentation on CT images has been presented.center dot Automated segmentation of ovarian cancer lesions can be comparable with manual segmentation of trainee radiologists.center dot Careful hyperparameter tuning can provide models significantly outperforming strong state-of-the-art baselines.Key points center dot The first automated approach for pelvic/ovarian and omental ovarian cancer lesion segmentation on CT images has been presented.center dot Automated segmentation of ovarian cancer lesions can be comparable with manual segmentation of trainee radiologists.center dot Careful hyperparameter tuning can provide models significantly outperforming strong state-of-the-art baselines.