Overview of the HECKTOR Challenge at MICCAI 2021: Automatic Head and Neck Tumor Segmentation and Outcome Prediction in PET/CT Images

This paper presents an overview of the second edition of the HEad and neCK TumOR (HECKTOR) challenge, organized as a satellite event of the 24th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) 2021. The challenge is composed of three tasks related to the automatic analysis of PET/CT images for patients with Head and Neck cancer (H&N), focusing on the oropharynx region. Task 1 is the automatic segmentation of H&N primary Gross Tumor Volume (GTVt) in FDG-PET/CT images. Task 2 is the automatic prediction of Progression Free Survival (PFS) from the same FDG-PET/CT. Finally, Task 3 is the same as Task 2 with ground truth GTVt annotations provided to the participants. The data were collected from six centers for a total of 325 images, split into 224 training and 101 testing cases. The interest in the challenge was highlighted by the important participation with 103 registered teams and 448 result submissions. The best methods obtained a Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 0.7591 in the first task, and a Concordance index (C-index) of 0.7196 and 0.6978 in Tasks 2 and 3, respectively. In all tasks, simplicity of the approach was found to be key to ensure generalization performance. The comparison of the PFS prediction performance in Tasks 2 and 3 suggests that providing the GTVt contour was not crucial to achieve best results, which indicates that fully automatic methods can be used. This potentially obviates the need for GTVt contouring, opening avenues for reproducible and large scale radiomics studies including thousands potential subjects.

3D Solid Spherical Bispectrum CNNs for Biomedical Texture Analysis

Locally Rotation Invariant (LRI) operators have shown great potential in biomedical texture analysis where patterns appear at random positions and orientations. LRI operators can be obtained by computing the responses to the discrete rotation of local descriptors, such as Local Binary Patterns (LBP) or the Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT). Other strategies achieve this invariance using Laplacian of Gaussian or steerable wavelets for instance, preventing the introduction of sampling errors during the discretization of the rotations. In this work, we obtain LRI operators via the local projection of the image on the spherical harmonics basis, followed by the computation of the bispectrum, which shares and extends the invariance properties of the spectrum. We investigate the benefits of using the bispectrum over the spectrum in the design of a LRI layer embedded in a shallow Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for 3D image analysis. The performance of each design is evaluated on two datasets and compared against a standard 3D CNN. The first dataset is made of 3D volumes composed of synthetically generated rotated patterns, while the second contains malignant and benign pulmonary nodules in Computed Tomography (CT) images. The results indicate that bispectrum CNNs allows for a significantly better characterization of 3D textures than both the spectral and standard CNN. In addition, it can efficiently learn with fewer training examples and trainable parameters when compared to a standard convolutional layer.