Toward a deep learning-based magnetic resonance imaging only workflow for postimplant dosimetry in I-125 seed...

The current standard imaging-technique for creating postplans in seed prostate brachytherapy is computed tomography (CT), that is associated with additional radiation exposure and poor soft tissue contrast. To establish a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) only workflow combining improved tissue contrast and high seed detectability, a deep learning-approach for automatic seed segmentation on MRI-scans was developed.

Patients treated with I-125 seed brachytherapy received a postplan-CT and a 1.5 T MRI-scan on nominal day 30 after implantation. For MRI-based seed visualization, DIXON-sequences were acquired and deep learning-based quantitative susceptibility maps (QSM) were generated from 3D-gradient-echo-sequences from 20 patients. Seed segmentations created on CT served as ground truth. For automatic seed segmentation on MRI, a 3D nnU-net model was trained using QSM and DIXON, both solely and combined.

Of the implanted seeds 94.8 ± 2.4% were detected with deep learning automatic segmentation entrained on both QSM and DIXON data. Models trained on the individual sequence data-sets performed worse with detection rates of 87.5 ± 2.6% or 88.6 ± 7.5% for QSM and DIXON respectively. The seed centers identified on CT versus QSM and DIXON were on average 1.8 ± 1.3 mm apart. Postimplant dosimetry for evaluation of positioning inaccuracies revealed only small variations of up to 0.4 ± 4.26 Gy in D90 (dose 90% of the prostate receives) between the standard CT-approach and our MRI-only workflow.

The proposed deep learning-based MRI-only workflow provided a promisingly accurate and robust seed localization and thus has the potential to compete with current state-of-the-art CT-based postimplant dosimetry in the future.