Towards a Benchmark for Colorectal Cancer Segmentation in Endorectal Ultrasound Videos: Dataset and Model Development

TL;DR

This paper introduces ERUS-10K, a large annotated dataset for colorectal cancer in endorectal ultrasound videos, and proposes the ASTR model that leverages temporal information and adaptive augmentation for improved segmentation accuracy.

Contribution

The paper provides the first large-scale ERUS dataset with annotations and develops a novel ASTR model that effectively handles scanning mode differences and temporal data.

Findings

ASTR achieves 77.6% Dice score, outperforming previous methods.

The dataset covers diverse ERUS scenarios, enabling comprehensive benchmarking.

Adaptive augmentation improves model generalization across scanning modes.

Abstract

Endorectal ultrasound (ERUS) is an important imaging modality that provides high reliability for diagnosing the depth and boundary of invasion in colorectal cancer. However, the lack of a large-scale ERUS dataset with high-quality annotations hinders the development of automatic ultrasound diagnostics. In this paper, we collected and annotated the first benchmark dataset that covers diverse ERUS scenarios, i.e. colorectal cancer segmentation, detection, and infiltration depth staging. Our ERUS-10K dataset comprises 77 videos and 10,000 high-resolution annotated frames. Based on this dataset, we further introduce a benchmark model for colorectal cancer segmentation, named the Adaptive Sparse-context TRansformer (ASTR). ASTR is designed based on three considerations: scanning mode discrepancy, temporal information, and low computational complexity. For generalizing to different scanning modes, the adaptive scanning-mode augmentation is proposed to convert between raw sector images and linear scan ones. For mining temporal information, the sparse-context transformer is incorporated to integrate inter-frame local and global features. For reducing computational complexity, the sparse-context block is introduced to extract contextual features from auxiliary frames. Finally, on the benchmark dataset, the proposed ASTR model achieves a 77.6% Dice score in rectal cancer segmentation, largely outperforming previous state-of-the-art methods.