Ballroom B
Purpose: Lung fibrosis segmentation is needed for translational research to optimize treatment, but currently few segmentation tools exist. This study investigates the impact of fine-tuning a general interactive deep learning method on lung fibrosis segmentation given a small training set.
Methods: 211 Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer patients (T1-4N0-3M0-1) with Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy were evaluated. In n=38 (18%), radiation-induced fibrosis was described in follow-up CT imaging and manually segmented to obtain a ground truth. A deep learning tool was evaluated against manually segmented fibrotic volumes using either original pre-trained weights (trained on larger datasets including 19 different organs/structures, excluding lung fibrosis) or after fine-tuning on the lung fibrosis cases using 5-fold cross-validation. To segment, the model receives one user interaction as an input, in the form of a single contour at the central axial slice of the structure. Additionally, the model is evaluated given multiple contour inputs at a fixed slice distance. Fine-tuning was performed using extensive image augmentation and pixel-wise binary cross-entropy with the Adam optimizer at an initial learning rate of 1e-6.
Results: Fine-tuning resulted in a significant increase in segmentation performance (p-value<0.01), when given a single input; increasing Dice Similarity Coefficient from 0.60±0.15 to 0.72±0.11, and reducing 95% Hausdorff Distance from 23±20mm to 15±8mm and relative Added Path Length from 0.63±0.11 to 0.51±0.12. The original model can achieve similar performance as after fine-tuning when given contour inputs every seven slices instead of a single contour.
Conclusion: The performance of the fine-tuned model with a single interactive input is comparable to the original model’s performance with ~4 inputs. This demonstrates the potential time savings provided by task-specific fine-tuning and continual learning for structures that still require manual segmentation.
Funding Support, Disclosures, and Conflict of Interest: This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No.766276. KAV acknowledges funding support from CRUK Radnet Centre (A28736).