Automatic detection and recognition of nasopharynx gross tumour volume (GTVnx) by deep learning for nasopharyngeal cancer radiotherapy through magnetic resonance imaging

BACKGROUND: In this study, we propose the deep learning model-based framework to automatically delineate nasopharynx gross tumor volume (GTVnx) in MRI images. METHODS: MRI images from 200 patients were collected for training-validation and testing set. Three popular deep learning models (FCN, U-Net, Deeplabv3) are proposed to automatically delineate GTVnx. FCN was the first and simplest fully convolutional model. U-Net was proposed specifically for medical image segmentation. In Deeplabv3, the proposed Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) block, and fully connected Conditional Random Field(CRF) may improve the detection of the small scattered distributed tumor parts due to its different scale of spatial pyramid layers. The three models are compared under same fair criteria, except the learning rate set for the U-Net. Two widely applied evaluation standards, mIoU and mPA, are employed for the detection result evaluation. RESULTS: The extensive experiments show that the results of FCN and Deeplabv3 are promising as the benchmark of automatic nasopharyngeal cancer detection. Deeplabv3 performs best with the detection of mIoU 0.8529 ± 0.0017 and mPA 0.9103 ± 0.0039. FCN performs slightly worse in term of detection accuracy. However, both consume similar GPU memory and training time. U-Net performs obviously worst in both detection accuracy and memory consumption. Thus U-Net is not suggested for automatic GTVnx delineation. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed framework for automatic target delineation of GTVnx in nasopharynx bring us the desirable and promising results, which could not only be labor-saving, but also make the contour evaluation more objective. This preliminary results provide us with clear directions for further study. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13014-023-02260-1.