Head and Neck Tumor Segmentation for MRI-Guided Radiation Therapy Using Pre-trained STU-Net Models

Accurate segmentation of tumors in MRI-guided radiation therapy (RT) is crucial for effective treatment planning, particularly for complex malignancies such as head and neck cancer (HNC). This study presents a comparative analysis between two state-of-the-art deep learning models, nnU-Net v2 and STU-Net, for automatic tumor segmentation in pre-RT MRI images. While both models are designed for medical image segmentation, STU-Net introduces critical improvements in scalability and transferability, with parameter sizes ranging from 14 million to 1.4 billion. Leveraging large-scale pre-training on datasets such as TotalSegmentator, STU-Net captures complex and variable tumor structures more effectively. We modified the default nnU-Net v2 by adding additional convolutional layers to both the encoder and decoder, improving its performance for MRI data. Based on our experimental results, STU-Net demonstrated better performance than nnU-Net v2 in the head and neck tumor segmentation challenge. These findings suggest that integrating advanced models like STU-Net into clinical work-flows could remarkably enhance the precision of RT planning, potentially improving patient outcomes. Ultimately, the performance of the fine-tuned STU-Net-B model submitted for the final evaluation phase of Task 1 in this challenge achieved a DSCagg-GTVp of 0.76, a DSCagg-GTVn of 0.85, and an overall DSCagg-mean score of 0.81, securing ninth place in the Task 1 rankings. The described solution is by team SZTU-SingularMatrix for Head and Neck Tumor Segmentation for MR-Guided Applications (HNTS-MRG) 2024 challenge. Link to the trained model weights: https://github.com/Duskwang/Weight/releases.