Interactive Outlining of Pancreatic Cancer Liver Metastases in Ultrasound Images

TL;DR

This paper introduces an interactive segmentation method for pancreatic cancer liver metastases in ultrasound images, providing real-time feedback to improve accuracy over manual outlining despite low image quality.

Contribution

The study presents a novel interactive segmentation approach that offers real-time results, enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of metastasis delineation in ultrasound images.

Findings

Achieved an average Dice Score of 85%

Attained an average Hausdorff Distance of 13 pixels

Effective even in challenging low-contrast cases

Abstract

Ultrasound (US) is the most commonly used liver imaging modality worldwide. Due to its low cost, it is increasingly used in the follow-up of cancer patients with metastases localized in the liver. In this contribution, we present the results of an interactive segmentation approach for liver metastases in US acquisitions. A (semi-) automatic segmentation is still very challenging because of the low image quality and the low contrast between the metastasis and the surrounding liver tissue. Thus, the state of the art in clinical practice is still manual measurement and outlining of the metastases in the US images. We tackle the problem by providing an interactive segmentation approach providing real-time feedback of the segmentation results. The approach has been evaluated with typical US acquisitions from the clinical routine, and the datasets consisted of pancreatic cancer metastases. Even for difficult cases, satisfying segmentations results could be achieved because of the interactive real-time behavior of the approach. In total, 40 clinical images have been evaluated with our method by comparing the results against manual ground truth segmentations. This evaluation yielded to an average Dice Score of 85% and an average Hausdorff Distance of 13 pixels.