Deep Learning Pipeline for Automated Assessment of Distances Between Tonsillar Tumors and the Internal Carotid Artery.
Authors
Affiliations (3)
Affiliations (3)
- Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, USA.
- Division of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
- Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Johns Hopkins Medical Institute, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
Abstract
Evaluating the minimum distance (dTICA) between the internal carotid artery (ICA) and tonsillar tumors (TT) on imaging is essential for preoperative planning; we propose a tool to automatically extract dTICA. CT scans of 96 patients with TT were selected from the cancer imaging archive. nnU-Net, a deep learning framework, was implemented to automatically segment both the TT and ICA from these scans. Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and average hausdorff distance (AHD) were used to evaluate the performance of the nnU-Net. Thereafter, an automated tool was built to calculate the magnitude of dTICA from these segmentations. The average DSC and AHD were 0.67, 2.44 mm, and 0.83, 0.49 mm for the TT and ICA, respectively. The mean dTICA was 6.66 mm and statistically varied by tumor T stage (p = 0.00456). The proposed pipeline can accurately and automatically capture dTICA, potentially assisting clinicians in preoperative evaluation.