KEVS: enhancing segmentation of visceral adipose tissue in pre-cystectomy CT with Gaussian kernel density estimation.
Authors
Affiliations (5)
Affiliations (5)
- Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, UCL Hawkes Institute, UCL, London, UK. [email protected].
- Human Physiology and Performance Laboratory (HPPL), Division of Surgery and Interventional Science, Department of Targeted Intervention, Centre for Peri-operative Medicine, UCL, London, UK. [email protected].
- Department of Anaesthesia and Peri-operative Medicine, University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK.
- Human Physiology and Performance Laboratory (HPPL), Division of Surgery and Interventional Science, Department of Targeted Intervention, Centre for Peri-operative Medicine, UCL, London, UK.
- Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, UCL Hawkes Institute, UCL, London, UK.
Abstract
The distribution of visceral adipose tissue (VAT) in cystectomy patients is indicative of the incidence of postoperative complications. Existing VAT segmentation methods for computed tomography (CT) employing intensity thresholding have limitations relating to inter-observer variability. Moreover, the difficulty in creating ground-truth masks limits the development of deep learning (DL) models for this task. This paper introduces a novel method for VAT prediction in pre-cystectomy CT, which is fully automated and does not require ground-truth VAT masks for training, overcoming aforementioned limitations. We introduce the kernel density-enhanced VAT segmentator (KEVS), combining a DL semantic segmentation model, for multi-body feature prediction, with Gaussian kernel density estimation analysis of predicted subcutaneous adipose tissue to achieve accurate scan-specific predictions of VAT in the abdominal cavity. Uniquely for a DL pipeline, KEVS does not require ground-truth VAT masks. We verify the ability of KEVS to accurately segment abdominal organs in unseen CT data and compare KEVS VAT segmentation predictions to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches in a dataset of 20 pre-cystectomy CT scans, collected from University College London Hospital (UCLH-Cyst), with expert ground-truth annotations. KEVS presents a <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mrow><mn>4.80</mn> <mo>%</mo></mrow> </math> and <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mrow><mn>6.02</mn> <mo>%</mo></mrow> </math> improvement in Dice coefficient over the second best DL and thresholding-based VAT segmentation techniques respectively when evaluated on UCLH-Cyst. This research introduces KEVS, an automated, SOTA method for the prediction of VAT in pre-cystectomy CT which eliminates inter-observer variability and is trained entirely on open-source CT datasets which do not contain ground-truth VAT masks.