Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Publication Date

8-5-2025

Journal

Scientific Reports

DOI

10.1038/s41598-025-13601-3

PMID

40764730

PMCID

PMC12325674

PubMedCentral® Posted Date

8-5-2025

PubMedCentral® Full Text Version

Post-print

Abstract

Radiotherapy is the main treatment modality of oropharyngeal cancer (OPC), in which an accurate segmentation of primary gross tumor volume (GTVt) is essential but also challenging due to significant interobserver variability and the time consumed in manual tumor delineation. For such a challenge an interactive deep learning (DL) based approach offers the advantage of automatic high-performance segmentation with the flexibility for user correction when necessary. In this study, we investigate an interactive DL for GTVt segmentation in OPC by introducing a novel two-stage Interactive Click Refinement (2S-ICR) framework and implementing state-of-the-art algorithms. Using the 2021 HEad and neCK TumOR dataset for development and an external dataset from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center for evaluation, the 2S-ICR framework achieves a Dice similarity coefficient of 0.722 ± 0.142 without user interaction and 0.858 ± 0.050 after ten interactions, thus outperforming existing methods in both cases.

Keywords

Humans, Oropharyngeal Neoplasms, Tumor Burden, Imaging, Three-Dimensional, Deep Learning, Algorithms

Published Open-Access

yes

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.