Diffusion-based Radiotherapy Dose Prediction Guided by Inter-slice Aware Structure Encoding

Deep learning (DL) has successfully automated dose distribution prediction in radiotherapy planning, enhancing both efficiency and quality. However, existing methods suffer from the over-smoothing problem for their commonly used L1 or L2 loss with posterior average calculations. To alleviate this limitation, we propose a diffusion model-based method (DiffDose) for predicting the radiotherapy dose distribution of cancer patients. Specifically, the DiffDose model contains a forward process and a reverse process. In the forward process, DiffDose transforms dose distribution maps into pure Gaussian noise by gradually adding small noise and a noise predictor is simultaneously trained to estimate the noise added at each timestep. In the reverse process, it removes the noise from the pure Gaussian noise in multiple steps with the well-trained noise predictor and finally outputs the predicted dose distribution maps...

Polymerized Feature-based Domain Adaptation for Cervical Cancer Dose Map Prediction

Recently, deep learning (DL) has automated and accelerated the clinical radiation therapy (RT) planning significantly by predicting accurate dose maps. However, most DL-based dose map prediction methods are data-driven and not applicable for cervical cancer where only a small amount of data is available. To address this problem, this paper proposes to transfer the rich knowledge learned from another cancer, i.e., rectum cancer, which has the same scanning area and more clinically available data, to improve the dose map prediction performance for cervical cancer through domain adaptation. In order to close the congenital domain gap between the source (i.e., rectum cancer) and the target (i.e., cervical cancer) domains, we develop an effective Transformer-based polymerized feature module (PFM), which can generate an optimal polymerized feature distribution to smoothly align the two input distributions. Experimental results on two in-house clinical datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method compared with state-of-the-art methods.

DSU-net: Dense SegU-net for automatic head-and-neck tumor segmentation in MR images

Precise and accurate segmentation of the most common head-and-neck tumor, nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC), in MRI sheds light on treatment and regulatory decisions making. However, the large variations in the lesion size and shape of NPC, boundary ambiguity, as well as the limited available annotated samples conspire NPC segmentation in MRI towards a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a Dense SegU-net (DSU-net) framework for automatic NPC segmentation in MRI. Our contribution is threefold. First, different from the traditional decoder in U-net using upconvolution for upsamling, we argue that the restoration from low resolution features to high resolution output should be capable of preserving information significant for precise boundary localization. Hence, we use unpooling to unsample and propose SegU-net. Second, to combat the potential vanishing-gradient problem, we introduce dense blocks which can facilitate feature propagation and reuse. Third, using only cross entropy (CE) as loss function may bring about troubles such as miss-prediction, therefore we propose to use a loss function comprised of both CE loss and Dice loss to train the network. Quantitative and qualitative comparisons are carried out extensively on in-house datasets, the experimental results show that our proposed architecture outperforms the existing state-of-the-art segmentation networks.