Lightweight MRI-Based Automated Segmentation of Pancreatic Cancer with Auto3DSeg

TL;DR

This study presents an automated MRI-based segmentation method for pancreatic tumors using SegResNet models, evaluated on two datasets, highlighting current challenges and potential for future improvements in clinical applications.

Contribution

The paper introduces Auto3DSeg with SegResNet for pancreatic tumor segmentation on MRI, demonstrating its performance across two datasets and emphasizing the need for larger standardized datasets.

Findings

SegResNet achieved moderate DSC scores of 0.56 and 0.33 on two tasks.

Performance varied significantly between MRI sequences.

Results highlight challenges in small dataset MRI segmentation.

Abstract

Accurate delineation of pancreatic tumors is critical for diagnosis, treatment planning, and outcome assessment, yet automated segmentation remains challenging due to anatomical variability and limited dataset availability. In this study, SegResNet models, as part of the Auto3DSeg architecture, were trained and evaluated on two MRI-based pancreatic tumor segmentation tasks as part of the 2025 PANTHER Challenge. Algorithm methodology included 5-fold cross-validation with STAPLE ensembling after focusing on an anatomically relevant region-of-interest. The Pancreatic Tumor Segmentation on Diagnostic MRI task 1 training set included 91 T1-weighted arterial contrast-enhanced MRI with expert annotated pancreas and tumor labels. The Pancreatic Tumor Segmentation on MR-Linac task 2 training set used 50 T2-weighted MR-Linac cases with expert annotated pancreas and tumor labels. Algorithm-automated segmentation performance of pancreatic tumor was assessed using Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC), 5 mm DSC, 95th percentile Hausdorff Distance (HD95), Mean Average Surface Distance (MASD), and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE). For Task 1, the algorithm achieved a DSC of 0.56, 5 mm DSC of 0.73, HD95 of 41.1 mm, MASD of 26.0 mm, and RMSE of 5164 mm. For Task 2, performance decreased, with a DSC of 0.33, 5 mm DSC of 0.50, HD95 of 20.1 mm, MASD of 7.2 mm, and RMSE of 17,203 mm. These findings illustrate the challenges of MRI-based pancreatic tumor segmentation with small datasets, highlighting variability introduced by different MRI sequences. Despite modest performance, the results demonstrate potential for automated delineation and emphasize the need for larger, standardized MRI datasets to improve model robustness and clinical utility.