Enhancing Head and Neck Tumor Segmentation in MRI: The Impact of Image Preprocessing and Model Ensembling

The adoption of online adaptive MR-guided radiotherapy (MRgRT) for Head and Neck Cancer (HNC) treatment faces challenges due to the complexity of manual HNC tumor delineation. This study focused on the problem of HNC tumor segmentation and investigated the effects of different preprocessing techniques, robust segmentation models, and ensembling steps on segmentation accuracy to propose an optimal solution. We contributed to the MICCAI Head and Neck Tumor Segmentation for MR-Guided Applications (HNTS-MRG) challenge which contains segmentation of HNC tumors in Task1) pre-RT and Task2) mid-RT MR images. In the internal validation phase, the most accurate results were achieved by ensembling two models trained on maximally cropped and contrast-enhanced images which yielded average volumetric Dice scores of (0.680, 0.785) and (0.493, 0.810) for (GTVp, GTVn) on pre-RT and mid-RT volumes. For the final testing phase, the models were submitted under the team's name of "Stockholm_Trio" and the overall segmentation performance achieved aggregated Dice scores of (0.795, 0.849) and (0.553, 0.865) for pre- and mid-RT tasks, respectively. The developed models are available at https://github.com/Astarakee/miccai24.