Dual-energy CT for automatic organs-at-risk segmentation in brain-tumor patients using a multi-atlas and deep-learning approach

Brent van der Heyden, Patrick Wohlfahrt, Danielle B. P. Eekers, Christian Richter, Karin Terhaag, Esther G. C. Troost, Frank Verhaegen*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

In radiotherapy, computed tomography (CT) datasets are mostly used for radiation treatment planning to achieve a high-conformal tumor coverage while optimally sparing healthy tissue surrounding the tumor, referred to as organs-at-risk (OARs). Based on CT scan and/or magnetic resonance images, OARs have to be manually delineated by clinicians, which is one of the most time-consuming tasks in the clinical workflow. Recent multi-atlas (MA) or deep-learning (DL) based methods aim to improve the clinical routine by an automatic segmentation of OARs on a CT dataset. However, so far no studies investigated the performance of these MA or DL methods on dual-energy CT (DECT) datasets, which have been shown to improve the image quality compared to conventional 120 kVp single-energy CT. In this study, the performance of an in-house developed MA and a DL method (two-step three-dimensional U-net) was quantitatively and qualitatively evaluated on various DECT-derived pseudo-monoenergetic CT datasets ranging from 40 keV to 170 keV. At lower energies, the MA method resulted in more accurate OAR segmentations. Both the qualitative and quantitative metric analysis showed that the DL approach often performed better than the MA method.

Original languageEnglish
Article number4126
Pages (from-to)1-9
Number of pages9
JournalScientific Reports
Volume9
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 11 Mar 2019

Keywords

  • CLINICAL IMPLEMENTATION
  • HEAD
  • GUIDANCE
  • IMAGES

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