An Enhanced Coarse-to-Fine Framework for the Segmentation of Clinical Target Volume

Chen, Huai; Qian, Dahong; Liu, Weiping; Li, Hui; Wang, Lisheng

In radiation therapy, obtaining accurate boundary of the clinical target volume (CTV) is the vital step to decrease the risk of treatment failures. However, it is a time-consuming and laborious task to obtain the delineation by hand. Therefore, an automatic algorithm is urgently needed to realize accurate segmentation. In this paper, we propose an enhanced coarse-to-fine frameworkto automatically fuse the information of CT, T1 and T2 images to get the target region. This framework includes a coarse-segmentation stage to identify the region of interest (ROI) of targets and a fine-segmentation stage to iteratively refine the segmentation. In the coarse-segmentation stage, the F-loss is proposed to keep the high recall rate of the ROI. In the fine segmentation, the ROI of target will be first cropped according to the ROI obtained by coarse-segmentation and be fed into a 3D-Unet to get the initial results. Then, the prediction and medium features will be set as additional information for the next one network to refine the results. When evaluated on the validation dataset of challenge of Anatomical Brain Barriers to Cancer Spread (ABCs), our method won the [Formula: see text] place in the public leaderboard.