Comparison of commercial atlas-based automatic segmentation software for prostate radiotherapy treatment planning

This study aims to assess the accuracy of automatic atlas-based contours for various key anatomical structures in prostate radiotherapy treatment planning. The evaluated structures include the bladder, rectum, prostate, seminal vesicles, femoral heads and penile bulb. CT images from 20 patients who underwent intensity-modulated radiotherapy were randomly chosen to create an atlas library. Atlas contours of the seven anatomical structures were generated using four software packages: ABAS, Eclipse, MIM, and RayStation. These contours were then compared to manual delineations performed by oncologists, which served as the ground truth. Evaluation metrics such as dice similarity coefficient (DSC), mean distance to agreement (MDA), and volume ratio (VR) were calculated to assess the accuracy of the contours. Additionally, the time taken by each software to generate the atlas contour was recorded. The mean DSC values for the bladder exhibited strong agreement (>0.8) with manual delineations for all software except for Eclipse and RayStation. Similarly, the femoral heads showed significant similarity between the atlas contours and ground truth across all software, with mean DSC values exceeding 0.9 and MDA values close to zero. On the other hand, the penile bulb displayed only moderate agreement with the ground truth, with mean DSC values ranging from 0.5 to 0.7 for all software. A similar trend was observed in the prostate atlas contours, except for MIM, which achieved a mean DSC of over 0.8. For the rectum, both ABAS and MIM atlases demonstrated strong agreement with the ground truth, resulting in mean DSC values of more than 0.8. Overall, MIM and ABAS outperformed Eclipse and RayStation in both DSC and MDA. These results indicate that the atlas-based segmentation employed in this study produces acceptable contours for the anatomical structures of interest in prostate radiotherapy treatment planning.