Head-and-neck organs-at-risk auto-delineation using dual pyramid networks for CBCT-guided adaptive radiotherapy

Organ-at-risk (OAR) delineation is a key step for cone-beam CT (CBCT) based adaptive radiotherapy planning that can be a time-consuming, labor-intensive, and subject-to-variability process. We aim to develop a fully automated approach aided by synthetic MRI for rapid and accurate CBCT multi-organ contouring in head-and-neck (HN) cancer patients. MRI has superb soft-tissue contrasts, while CBCT offers bony-structure contrasts. Using the complementary information provided by MRI and CBCT is expected to enable accurate multi-organ segmentation in HN cancer patients. In our proposed method, MR images are firstly synthesized using a pre-trained cycle-consistent generative adversarial network given CBCT. The features of CBCT and synthetic MRI (sMRI) are then extracted using dual pyramid networks for final delineation of organs. CBCT images and their corresponding manual contours were used as pairs to train and test the proposed model. Quantitative metrics including Dice similarity coefficient (DSC), Hausdorff distance 95% (HD95), mean surface distance, and residual mean square distance (RMS) were used to evaluate the proposed method. The proposed method was evaluated on a cohort of 65 HN cancer patients. CBCT images were collected from those patients who received proton therapy. Overall, DSC values of 0.87 0.03, 0.79 0.10/0.79 0.11, 0.89 0.08/0.89 0.07, 0.90 0.08, 0.75 0.06/0.77 0.06, 0.86 0.13, 0.66 0.14, 0.78 0.05/0.77 0.04, 0.96 0.04, 0.89 0.04/0.89 0.04, 0.83 0.02, and 0.84 0.07 for commonly used OARs for treatment planning including brain stem, left/right cochlea, left/right eye, larynx, left/right lens, mandible, optic chiasm, left/right optic nerve, oral cavity, left/right parotid, pharynx, and spinal cord, respectively, were achieved. This study provides a rapid and accurate OAR auto-delineation approach, which can be used for adaptive radiation therapy.

Automated summary

The study aims to develop a fully automated approach for rapid and accurate multi-organ contouring in head-and-neck cancer patients using synthetic MRI and CBCT technology. By combining the information provided by MRI and CBCT, accurate multi-organ segmentation in HN cancer patients is expected. The proposed method shows promising results in terms of DSC values and can be a valuable tool for adaptive radiation therapy.