Optimizing Synthetic Data for Enhanced Pancreatic Tumor Segmentation

TL;DR

This paper evaluates how different synthetic data generation strategies impact pancreatic tumor segmentation accuracy, emphasizing the importance of tumor size selection and boundary precision for clinical applications.

Contribution

It provides a critical analysis of synthetic data augmentation techniques, highlighting the significance of tumor size and boundary accuracy in improving segmentation performance.

Findings

Selecting optimal synthetic tumor sizes enhances segmentation accuracy.

Precise boundary generation in synthetic tumors significantly improves model performance.

Refined synthetic data augmentation can better support clinical decision-making.

Abstract

Pancreatic cancer remains one of the leading causes of cancer-related mortality worldwide. Precise segmentation of pancreatic tumors from medical images is a bottleneck for effective clinical decision-making. However, achieving a high accuracy is often limited by the small size and availability of real patient data for training deep learning models. Recent approaches have employed synthetic data generation to augment training datasets. While promising, these methods may not yet meet the performance benchmarks required for real-world clinical use. This study critically evaluates the limitations of existing generative-AI based frameworks for pancreatic tumor segmentation. We conduct a series of experiments to investigate the impact of synthetic \textit{tumor size} and \textit{boundary definition} precision on model performance. Our findings demonstrate that: (1) strategically selecting a combination of synthetic tumor sizes is crucial for optimal segmentation outcomes, and (2) generating synthetic tumors with precise boundaries significantly improves model accuracy. These insights highlight the importance of utilizing refined synthetic data augmentation for enhancing the clinical utility of segmentation models in pancreatic cancer decision making including diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment plans. Our code will be available at https://github.com/lkpengcs/SynTumorAnalyzer.