PSAT: Pediatric Segmentation Approaches via Adult Augmentations and Transfer Learning

TL;DR

This paper systematically evaluates strategies for pediatric medical image segmentation, emphasizing transfer learning and data augmentation, to improve accuracy over adult-trained models, with insights applicable to diverse datasets.

Contribution

Introduces PSAT, a comprehensive study on pediatric segmentation strategies using adult augmentations and transfer learning, highlighting pitfalls and best practices.

Findings

Adult-based training plans degrade pediatric segmentation performance.

Continual learning improves generalization across pediatric datasets.

Transfer learning mitigates institutional shifts.

Abstract

Pediatric medical imaging presents unique challenges due to significant anatomical and developmental differences compared to adults. Direct application of segmentation models trained on adult data often yields suboptimal performance, particularly for small or rapidly evolving structures. To address these challenges, several strategies leveraging the nnU-Net framework have been proposed, differing along four key axes: (i) the fingerprint dataset (adult, pediatric, or a combination thereof) from which the Training Plan -including the network architecture-is derived; (ii) the Learning Set (adult, pediatric, or mixed), (iii) Data Augmentation parameters, and (iv) the Transfer learning method (finetuning versus continual learning). In this work, we introduce PSAT (Pediatric Segmentation Approaches via Adult Augmentations and Transfer learning), a systematic study that investigates the impact of these axes on segmentation performance. We benchmark the derived strategies on two pediatric CT datasets and compare them with state-of-theart methods, including a commercial radiotherapy solution. PSAT highlights key pitfalls and provides actionable insights for improving pediatric segmentation. Our experiments reveal that a training plan based on an adult fingerprint dataset is misaligned with pediatric anatomy-resulting in significant performance degradation, especially when segmenting fine structures-and that continual learning strategies mitigate institutional shifts, thus enhancing generalization across diverse pediatric datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/ICANS-Strasbourg/PSAT.