Journal Article DKFZ-2025-01305

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Deep learning-based contour propagation in magnetic resonance imaging-guided radiotherapy of lung cancer patients.

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2025
IOP Publ. Bristol

Physics in medicine and biology 70, 145018 () [10.1088/1361-6560/ade8d0]
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Abstract: Fast and accurate organ-at-risk (OAR) and gross tumor volume (GTV) contour propagation methods are needed to improve the efficiency of magnetic resonance (MR) imaging-guided radiotherapy. We trained deformable image registration networks to accurately propagate contours from planning to fraction MR images. Approach: Data from 140 stage 1-2 lung cancer patients treated at a 0.35T MR-Linac were split into 102/17/21 for training/validation/testing. Additionally, 18 central lung tumor patients, treated at a 0.35T MR-Linac externally, and 14 stage 3 lung cancer patients from a phase 1 clinical trial, treated at 0.35T or 1.5T MR-Linacs at three institutions, were used for external testing. Planning and fraction images were paired (490 pairs) for training. Two hybrid transformer-convolutional neural network TransMorph models with mean squared error (MSE), Dice similarity coefficient (DSC), and regularization losses (TM_{MSE+Dice}) or MSE and regularization losses (TM_{MSE}) were trained to deformably register planning to fraction images. The TransMorph models predicted diffeomorphic dense displacement fields. Multi-label images including seven thoracic OARs and the GTV were propagated to generate fraction segmentations. Model predictions were compared with contours obtained through B-spline, vendor registration and the auto-segmentation method nnUNet. Evaluation metrics included the DSC and Hausdorff distance percentiles (50th and 95th) against clinical contours. Main results: TM_{MSE+Dice} and TM_{MSE} achieved mean OARs/GTV DSCs of 0.90/0.82 and 0.90/0.79 for the internal and 0.84/0.77 and 0.85/0.76 for the central lung tumor external test data. On stage 3 data, TM_{MSE+Dice} achieved mean OARs/GTV DSCs of 0.87/0.79 and 0.83/0.78 for the 0.35 T MR-Linac datasets, and 0.87/0.75 for the 1.5 T MR-Linac dataset. TM_{MSE+Dice} and TM_{MSE} had significantly higher geometric accuracy than other methods on external data. No significant difference between TM_{MSE+Dice} and TM_{MSE} was found. Significance: TransMorph models achieved time-efficient segmentation of fraction MRIs with high geometrical accuracy and accurately segmented images obtained at different field strengths.

Keyword(s): MR-linac ; MRgRT ; PUMA ; TransMorph ; deep learning ; image registration ; lung cancer

Classification:

Note: Med. Biol. 70 145018

Contributing Institute(s):
  1. E040 Med. Physik in der Strahlentherapie (E040)
  2. DKTK Koordinierungsstelle München (MU01)
  3. E050 KKE Strahlentherapie (E050)
Research Program(s):
  1. 315 - Bildgebung und Radioonkologie (POF4-315) (POF4-315)

Appears in the scientific report 2025
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Medline ; BIOSIS Previews ; Biological Abstracts ; Clarivate Analytics Master Journal List ; Current Contents - Life Sciences ; Ebsco Academic Search ; Essential Science Indicators ; IF < 5 ; JCR ; National-Konsortium ; SCOPUS ; Science Citation Index Expanded ; Web of Science Core Collection
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 Record created 2025-06-27, last modified 2025-07-31



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