Segmentation automatique de la fibrose pulmonaire sur images de tomodensitométrie en radio-oncologie
Pulmonary fibrosis is an interstitial lung disease characterized by an irreversible production of scarring tissue. Pulmonary fibrosis has a particularly poor prognosis, with a mean survival after diagnosis lower than many cancers. This pathology was recently identified as a risk for complication following radiation therapy treatments. Pulmonary toxicity can lead to severe conditions that compromise the benefits provided by radiation therapy, making pulmonary fibrosis a relative contraindication to treatments. Manual segmentation of fibrosis on computed tomography (CT) images is a difficult task that can involve many experts for a single patient. The aim of this project is to perform automatic segmentation of pulmonary fibrosis on CT images. Fully convolutional neural networks were developed and implemented to automatically assign lung tissues. For an input CT slice, every lung voxel is assigned a tissue in a single inference. Parameters optimization was performed in a supervised and semi-supervised manner by minimizing variants of the cross-entropy between the prediction and manual annotations produced by experts. The dataset employed consists of high resolution CT scans and delineations made by radiologists and radiation oncologists. Predicted segmentation maps were compared with manual segmentations to validate the tissues assigned by the convolutional networks. Results suggest that radiation oncology applications could be developed. Possible applications include pulmonary fibrosis screening prior to treatment planning and assessment of fibrosis progression during and post-treatment.
Automatic segmentation Pulmonary fibrosis Neural networks Machine learning