Ensemble Methods for Multi-Organ Segmentation in CT Series

TL;DR

This paper proposes ensemble methods combining single-organ models to improve multi-organ segmentation in CT scans, addressing data scarcity and model generalization challenges in medical imaging.

Contribution

It introduces three ensemble strategies that leverage specialized models to produce accurate multi-organ segmentation masks from limited data.

Findings

Ensembles outperform individual models in segmentation accuracy.

The proposed methods show promising results in multi-organ segmentation.

Ensemble approaches can mitigate data scarcity issues.

Abstract

In the medical images field, semantic segmentation is one of the most important, yet difficult and time-consuming tasks to be performed by physicians. Thanks to the recent advancement in the Deep Learning models regarding Computer Vision, the promise to automate this kind of task is getting more and more realistic. However, many problems are still to be solved, like the scarce availability of data and the difficulty to extend the efficiency of highly specialised models to general scenarios. Organs at risk segmentation for radiotherapy treatment planning falls in this category, as the limited data available negatively affects the possibility to develop general-purpose models; in this work, we focus on the possibility to solve this problem by presenting three types of ensembles of single-organ models able to produce multi-organ masks exploiting the different specialisations of their components. The results obtained are promising and prove that this is a possible solution to finding efficient multi-organ segmentation methods.