# 3D Graph Anatomy Geometry-Integrated Network for Pancreatic Mass Segmentation, Diagnosis, and Quantitative Patient Management

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.04701 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04701/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 8 Dec 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Bidirectional Copy-Paste for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00673/) (2023)
- [SQUID: Deep Feature In-Painting for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13495/) (2021)
- [MedShapeNet -- A Large-Scale Dataset of 3D Medical Shapes for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16139/) (2023)
- [Devil is in the Queries: Advancing Mask Transformers for Real-world Medical Image Segmentation and Out-of-Distribution Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00212/) (2023)
- [CancerUniT: Towards a Single Unified Model for Effective Detection, Segmentation, and Diagnosis of Eight Major Cancers Using a Large Collection of CT Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12291/) (2023)
- [ZePT: Zero-Shot Pan-Tumor Segmentation via Query-Disentangling and Self-Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04964/) (2023)
- [Exploiting Structural Consistency of Chest Anatomy for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection in Radiography Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08689/) (2024)
- [Medical Vision Generalist: Unifying Medical Imaging Tasks in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05565/) (2024)
- [Uncertainty-aware Evidential Fusion-based Learning for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06177/) (2024)
- [Single-Stage Broad Multi-Instance Multi-Label Learning (BMIML) with Diverse Inter-Correlations and its application to medical image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02625/) (2022)
- [Liver Tumor Screening and Diagnosis in CT with Pixel-Lesion-Patient Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08268/) (2023)
- [DeformCL: Learning Deformable Centerline Representation for Vessel Extraction in 3D Medical Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05820/) (2025)
- [AFiRe: Anatomy-Driven Self-Supervised Learning for Fine-Grained Representation in Radiographic Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10972/) (2025)
- [EAA-Net: Rethinking the Autoencoder Architecture with Intra-class Features for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09197/) (2022)
- [MorphoSeg: An Uncertainty-Aware Deep Learning Method for Biomedical Segmentation of Complex Cellular Morphologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17110/) (2024)
- [Label Filling via Mixed Supervision for Medical Image Segmentation from Noisy Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16057/) (2024)
- [A deep local attention network for pre-operative lymph node metastasis prediction in pancreatic cancer via multiphase CT imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01448/) (2023)
- [Meta-information-aware Dual-path Transformer for Differential Diagnosis of Multi-type Pancreatic Lesions in Multi-phase CT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00942/) (2023)
- [WT-BCP: Wavelet Transform based Bidirectional Copy-Paste for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14445/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The pancreatic disease taxonomy includes ten types of masses (tumors or cysts)[20,8]. Previous work focuses on developing segmentation or classification methods only for certain mass types. Differential diagnosis of all mass types is clinically highly desirable [20] but has not been investigated using an automated image understanding approach. We exploit the feasibility to distinguish pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) from the nine other nonPDAC masses using multi-phase CT imaging. Both image appearance and the 3D organ-mass geometry relationship are critical. We propose a holistic segmentation-mesh-classification network (SMCN) to provide patient-level diagnosis, by fully utilizing the geometry and location information, which is accomplished by combining the anatomical structure and the semantic detection-by-segmentation network. SMCN learns the pancreas and mass segmentation task and builds an anatomical correspondence-aware organ mesh model by progressively deforming a pancreas prototype on the raw segmentation mask (i.e., mask-to-mesh). A new graph-based residual convolutional network (Graph-ResNet), whose nodes fuse the information of the mesh model and feature vectors extracted from the segmentation network, is developed to produce the patient-level differential classification results. Extensive experiments on 661 patients' CT scans (five phases per patient) show that SMCN can improve the mass segmentation and detection accuracy compared to the strong baseline method nnUNet (e.g., for nonPDAC, Dice: 0.611 vs. 0.478; detection rate: 89% vs. 70%), achieve similar sensitivity and specificity in differentiating PDAC and nonPDAC as expert radiologists (i.e., 94% and 90%), and obtain results comparable to a multimodality test [20] that combines clinical, imaging, and molecular testing for clinical management of patients.