Automatic Segmentation of Necrosis Zones after Radiofrequency Ablation of Spinal Metastases

Johannes Steffen, Georg Hille, Mathias Becker, Sylvia Saalfeld, Klaus Tönnies

2020

Abstract

In this work, we propose an automatic deep learning-based approach to segment necrotizing tissue (necrosis zones) after radiofrequency ablations (RFA) of spinal metastases in follow-up Magnetic Resonance (MR) images. While the manual segmentation of those necrosis zones is challenging and time consuming, it is a crucial step to assess, whether a preceding therapy using RFA was successful and to what extent, i.e., to quantitatively evaluate how much of the metastasis was necrotized throughout the therapy. Therefore, we trained a U-Net like deep neural network on 26 clinical cases (and various augmentations of those), where each case had an associated contrast enhanced T1-weighted as well as a T2-weighted MR sequence. We evaluated the proposed approach on both sequences separately as well as in a combined setting and report Dice coefficients, sensitivity-, and specificity rates for the automatic segmentations. A Dice coefficient of up to 77.2 % indicates promising segmentation quality, if compared to related work and similar segmentation tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to tackle the problem of automatic segmentation of necrosis zones in MR images and therefore lacks comparability with related works. However, our best results are somewhat superior to semi-automatic approaches of liver metastases segmentation, which might be considered a problem of similar complexity.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Steffen J., Hille G., Becker M., Saalfeld S. and Tönnies K. (2020). Automatic Segmentation of Necrosis Zones after Radiofrequency Ablation of Spinal Metastases. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods - Volume 1: ICPRAM, ISBN 978-989-758-397-1, pages 96-102. DOI: 10.5220/0009174300960102

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icpram20,
author={Johannes Steffen and Georg Hille and Mathias Becker and Sylvia Saalfeld and Klaus Tönnies},
title={Automatic Segmentation of Necrosis Zones after Radiofrequency Ablation of Spinal Metastases},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods - Volume 1: ICPRAM,},
year={2020},
pages={96-102},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0009174300960102},
isbn={978-989-758-397-1},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods - Volume 1: ICPRAM,
TI - Automatic Segmentation of Necrosis Zones after Radiofrequency Ablation of Spinal Metastases
SN - 978-989-758-397-1
AU - Steffen J.
AU - Hille G.
AU - Becker M.
AU - Saalfeld S.
AU - Tönnies K.
PY - 2020
SP - 96
EP - 102
DO - 10.5220/0009174300960102