A smart and operator independent system to delineate tumours in Positron Emission Tomography scans
A smart and operator independent system to delineate tumours in Positron Emission Tomography scans
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DOI：
10.1016/j.compbiomed.2018.09.002
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发表时间：
2018-11-01
影响因子：
7.7
通讯作者：
Yezzi, Anthony
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Comelli, Albert;Stefano, Alessandro;Yezzi, Anthony
正电子发射断层扫描（PET）成像在改善放射治疗计划方面具有巨大的潜力，提供了与其他解剖成像方法互补的功能信息。本研究的目的是开发一种独立于操作人员、可靠且临床可行的系统，用于从PET图像中描绘生物肿瘤体积。在这种设计假设下，我们以一种原始的方式结合几种已知的方法来部署具有高自动化水平的系统。该系统自动识别肿瘤周围的最佳感兴趣区域，并执行逐片行进的局部活动轮廓分割。当识别出“无癌”切片时，它会自动停止。使用者的干预仅限于绘制癌症区域周围的初始粗略轮廓。通过设计，该算法执行分割，最小化对初始输入的依赖，从而使最终结果具有极高的可重复性。为了评估不同条件下的性能，我们的系统在一个数据集上进行了评估，该数据集包括五个合成实验和位于不同解剖区域（即肺、头颈部和大脑）的50个肿瘤病变，使用PET研究和18f -氟-2-脱氧-d-葡萄糖和11c标记的蛋氨酸放射性示踪剂。与最常见的PET分割方法相比，合成病变的结果显示出增强的性能。在临床病例中，该系统分割准确（平均骰子相似系数分别为85.36 +/- 2.94%、85.98 +/- 3.40%、88.02 +/- 2.75%，分别位于肺、头颈和脑区），与金标准吻合度高（确定系数R-2 = 0.98）。我们相信所提出的系统可以有效地用于日常临床常规，作为医疗决策工具，并为临床医生提供来自PET的额外信息，这些信息可以用于放射治疗，治疗和计划。
Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging has an enormous potential to improve radiation therapy treatment planning offering complementary functional information with respect to other anatomical imaging approaches.The aim of this study is to develop an operator independent, reliable, and clinically feasible system for biological tumour volume delineation from PET images. Under this design hypothesis, we combine several known approaches in an original way to deploy a system with a high level of automation.The proposed system automatically identifies the optimal region of interest around the tumour and performs a slice-by-slice marching local active contour segmentation. It automatically stops when a "cancer-free" slice is identified. User intervention is limited at drawing an initial rough contour around the cancer region. By design, the algorithm performs the segmentation minimizing any dependence from the initial input, so that the final result is extremely repeatable.To assess the performances under different conditions, our system is evaluated on a dataset comprising five synthetic experiments and fifty oncological lesions located in different anatomical regions (i.e. lung, head and neck, and brain) using PET studies with 18F-fluoro-2-deoxy-d-glucose and 11C-labeled Methionine radio-tracers.Results on synthetic lesions demonstrate enhanced performances when compared against the most common PET segmentation methods. In clinical cases, the proposed system produces accurate segmentations (average dice similarity coefficient: 85.36 +/- 2.94%, 85.98 +/- 3.40%, 88.02 +/- 2.75% in the lung, head and neck, and brain district, respectively) with high agreement with the gold standard (determination coefficient R-2 = 0.98). We believe that the proposed system could be efficiently used in the everyday clinical routine as a medical decision tool, and to provide the clinicians with additional information, derived from PET, which can be of use in radiation therapy, treatment, and planning.