# Head and Neck Tumor Segmentation of MRI from Pre- and Mid-radiotherapy with Pre-training, Data Augmentation and Dual Flow UNet

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14846 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14846/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [TransUNet: Transformers Make Strong Encoders for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04306/) (2021)
- [Generalizable Cross-modality Medical Image Segmentation via Style Augmentation and Dual Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11177/) (2021)
- [Learnable Cross-modal Knowledge Distillation for Multi-modal Learning with Missing Modality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01035/) (2023)
- [Efficient Spatial-Temporal Information Fusion for LiDAR-Based 3D Moving Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02201/) (2022)
- [SegRap2023: A Benchmark of Organs-at-Risk and Gross Tumor Volume Segmentation for Radiotherapy Planning of Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09576/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Head and neck tumors and metastatic lymph nodes are crucial for treatment planning and prognostic analysis. Accurate segmentation and quantitative analysis of these structures require pixel-level annotation, making automated segmentation techniques essential for the diagnosis and treatment of head and neck cancer. In this study, we investigated the effects of multiple strategies on the segmentation of pre-radiotherapy (pre-RT) and mid-radiotherapy (mid-RT) images. For the segmentation of pre-RT images, we utilized: 1) a fully supervised learning approach, and 2) the same approach enhanced with pre-trained weights and the MixUp data augmentation technique. For mid-RT images, we introduced a novel computational-friendly network architecture that features separate encoders for mid-RT images and registered pre-RT images with their labels. The mid-RT encoder branch integrates information from pre-RT images and labels progressively during the forward propagation. We selected the highest-performing model from each fold and used their predictions to create an ensemble average for inference. In the final test, our models achieved a segmentation performance of 82.38% for pre-RT and 72.53% for mid-RT on aggregated Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) as HiLab. Our code is available at https://github.com/WltyBY/HNTS-MRG2024_train_code.