Automatic segmentation of the gross target volume in radiotherapy for lung cancer using transresSEUnet 2.5D Network

OBJECTIVE: This paper intends to propose a method of using TransResSEUnet2.5D network for accurate automatic segmentation of the Gross Target Volume (GTV) in Radiotherapy for lung cancer. METHODS: A total of 11,370 computed tomograms (CT), deriving from 137 cases, of lung cancer patients under radiotherapy developed by radiotherapists were used as the training set; 1642 CT images in 20 cases were used as the validation set, and 1685 CT images in 20 cases were used as the test set. The proposed network was tuned and trained to obtain the best segmentation model and its performance was measured by the Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) and with 95% Hausdorff distance (HD95). Lastly, as to demonstrate the accuracy of the automatic segmentation of the network proposed in this study, all possible mirrors of the input images were put into Unet2D, Unet2.5D, Unet3D, ResSEUnet3D, ResSEUnet2.5D, and TransResUnet2.5D, and their respective segmentation performances were compared and assessed. RESULTS: The segmentation results of the test set showed that TransResSEUnet2.5D performed the best in the DSC (84.08 ± 0.04) %, HD95 (8.11 ± 3.43) mm and time (6.50 ± 1.31) s metrics compared to the other three networks. CONCLUSIONS: The TransResSEUnet 2.5D proposed in this study can automatically segment the GTV of radiotherapy for lung cancer patients with more accuracy.