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CT prostate segmentation based on synthetic MRI‐aided deep attention fully convolution network
Author(s) -
Lei Yang,
Dong Xue,
Tian Zhen,
Liu Yingzi,
Tian Sibo,
Wang Tonghe,
Jiang Xiaojun,
Patel Pretesh,
Jani Ashesh B.,
Mao Hui,
Curran Walter J.,
Liu Tian,
Yang Xiaofeng
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
medical physics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.473
H-Index - 180
eISSN - 2473-4209
pISSN - 0094-2405
DOI - 10.1002/mp.13933
Subject(s) - artificial intelligence , segmentation , hausdorff distance , computer science , deep learning , prostate , image segmentation , magnetic resonance imaging , pattern recognition (psychology) , convolution (computer science) , generative adversarial network , computer vision , medicine , radiology , artificial neural network , cancer
Purpose Accurate segmentation of the prostate on computed tomography (CT) for treatment planning is challenging due to CT's poor soft tissue contrast. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been used to aid prostate delineation, but its final accuracy is limited by MRI‐CT registration errors. We developed a deep attention‐based segmentation strategy on CT‐based synthetic MRI (sMRI) to deal with the CT prostate delineation challenge without MRI acquisition. Methods and materials We developed a prostate segmentation strategy which employs an sMRI‐aided deep attention network to accurately segment the prostate on CT. Our method consists of three major steps. First, a cycle generative adversarial network was used to estimate an sMRI from CT images. Second, a deep attention fully convolution network was trained based on sMRI and the prostate contours deformed from MRIs. Attention models were introduced to pay more attention to prostate boundary. The prostate contour for a query patient was obtained by feeding the patient's CT images into the trained sMRI generation model and segmentation model. Results The segmentation technique was validated with a clinical study of 49 patients by leave‐one‐out experiments and validated with an additional 50 patients by hold‐out test. The Dice similarity coefficient, Hausdorff distance, and mean surface distance indices between our segmented and deformed MRI‐defined prostate manual contours were 0.92 ± 0.09, 4.38 ± 4.66, and 0.62 ± 0.89 mm, respectively, with leave‐one‐out experiments, and were 0.91 ± 0.07, 4.57 ± 3.03, and 0.62 ± 0.65 mm, respectively, with hold‐out test. Conclusions We have proposed a novel CT‐only prostate segmentation strategy using CT‐based sMRI, and validated its accuracy against the prostate contours that were manually drawn on MRI images and deformed to CT images. This technique could provide accurate prostate volume for treatment planning without requiring MRI acquisition, greatly facilitating the routine clinical workflow.