A Physics-Guided Modular Deep-Learning Based Automated Framework for Tumor Segmentation in PET Images

The objective of this study was to develop a PET tumor-segmentation framework that addresses the challenges of limited spatial resolution, high image noise, and lack of clinical training data with ground-truth tumor boundaries in PET imaging. We propose a three-module PET-segmentation framework in the context of segmenting primary tumors in 3D FDG-PET images of patients with lung cancer on a per-slice basis. The first module generates PET images containing highly realistic tumors with known ground-truth using a new stochastic and physics-based approach, addressing lack of training data. The second module trains a modified U-net using these images, helping it learn the tumor-segmentation task. The third module fine-tunes this network using a small-sized clinical dataset with radiologist-defined delineations as surrogate ground-truth, helping the framework learn features potentially missed in simulated tumors. The framework's accuracy, generalizability to different scanners, sensitivity to partial volume effects (PVEs) and efficacy in reducing the number of training images were quantitatively evaluated using Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and several other metrics. The framework yielded reliable performance in both simulated (DSC: 0.87 (95% CI: 0.86, 0.88)) and patient images (DSC: 0.73 (95% CI: 0.71, 0.76)), outperformed several widely used semi-automated approaches, accurately segmented relatively small tumors (smallest segmented cross-section was 1.83 cm2), generalized across five PET scanners (DSC: 0.74), was relatively unaffected by PVEs, and required low training data (training with data from even 30 patients yielded DSC of 0.70). In conclusion, the proposed framework demonstrated the ability for reliable automated tumor delineation in FDG-PET images of patients with lung cancer.