# Detecting Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma in Multi-phase CT Scans via Alignment Ensemble

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.08441 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08441/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 Mar 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [External Attention Assisted Multi-Phase Splenic Vascular Injury Segmentation with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00942/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is one of the most lethal cancers among the population. Screening for PDACs in dynamic contrast-enhanced CT is beneficial for early diagnosis. In this paper, we investigate the problem of automated detecting PDACs in multi-phase (arterial and venous) CT scans. Multiple phases provide more information than single phase, but they are unaligned and inhomogeneous in texture, making it difficult to combine cross-phase information seamlessly. We study multiple phase alignment strategies, i.e., early alignment (image registration), late alignment (high-level feature registration), and slow alignment (multi-level feature registration), and suggest an ensemble of all these alignments as a promising way to boost the performance of PDAC detection. We provide an extensive empirical evaluation on two PDAC datasets and show that the proposed alignment ensemble significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches, illustrating the strong potential for clinical use.