Fully convolutional network-based multi-output model for automatic segmentation of organs at risk in thorax

PURPOSE: To propose a multi-output fully convolutional network (MOFCN) to segment bilateral lung, heart and spinal cord in the planning thoracic computed tomography (CT) slices automatically and simultaneously. METHODS: The MOFCN includes two components: one main backbone and three branches. The main backbone extracts the features about lung, heart and spinal cord. The extracted features are transferred to three branches which correspond to three organs respectively. The longest branch to segment spinal cord is nine layers, including input and output layers. The MOFCN was evaluated on 19,277 CT slices from 966 patients with cancer in the thorax. In these slices, the organs at risk (OARs) were delineated and validated by experienced radiation oncologists, and served as ground truth for training and evaluation. The data from 61 randomly chosen patients were used for training and validation. The remaining 905 patients’ slices were used for testing. The metric used to evaluate the similarity between the auto-segmented organs and their ground truth was Dice. Besides, we compared the MOFCN with other published models. To assess the distinct output design and the impact of layer number and dilated convolution, we compared MOFCN with a multi-label learning model and its variants. By analyzing the not good performances, we suggested possible solutions. RESULTS: MOFCN achieved Dice of 0.95 ± 0.02 for lung, 0.91 ± 0.03 for heart and 0.87 ± 0.06 for spinal cord. Compared to other models, MOFCN could achieve a comparable accuracy with the least time cost. CONCLUSION: The results demonstrated the MOFCN’s effectiveness. It uses less parameters to delineate three OARs simultaneously and automatically, and thus shows a relatively low requirement for hardware and has potential for broad application.