Auto-segmentation of thoracic organs in CT scans of breast cancer patients using a 3D U-net cascaded into 2D...

The quality of organ volume delineation significantly influences the efficacy of radiotherapy treatment for breast cancer patients. This study introduces a novel method for auto-segmentation of the breasts, lungs and heart. The proposed pipeline leverages a multi-class 3D U-Net with a pre-trained ResNet(2+1)D-18 encoder branch, cascaded with a 2D PatchGAN mask correction model for each class. This approach requires a single 3D model, providing a relatively efficient solution. The models were trained and evaluated on 70 thoracic DICOM datasets belonging to breast cancer patients. The evaluation demonstrated state-of-the-art segmentation performance, with mean Dice similarity coefficient values ranging from 0.89 to 0.98, Hausdorff distance values ranging from 2.25 to 8.68 mm, and mean surface distance values ranging from 0.62 to 2.79 mm. These results underscore the pipeline's potential to enhance breast cancer diagnosis and treatment strategies, with possible applications in other medical sectors utilizing auto-segmentation.