Determining The Role Of Radiation Oncologist Demographic Factors On Segmentation Quality: Insights From A Crowd-Sourced Challenge Using Bayesian Estimation.

backgroundMedical image auto-segmentation is poised to revolutionize radiotherapy workflows. The quality of auto-segmentation training data, primarily derived from clinician observers, is of utmost importance. However, the factors influencing the quality of these clinician-derived segmentations have yet to be fully understood or quantified. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine the role of common observer demographic variables on quantitative segmentation performance.

methodsOrgan at risk (OAR) and tumor volume segmentations provided by radiation oncologist observers from the Contouring Collaborative for Consensus in Radiation Oncology public dataset were utilized for this study. Segmentations were derived from five separate disease sites comprised of one patient case each: breast, sarcoma, head and neck (H&N), gynecologic (GYN), and gastrointestinal (GI). Segmentation quality was determined on a structure-by-structure basis by comparing the observer segmentations with an expert-derived consensus gold standard primarily using the Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC); surface DSC was investigated as a secondary metric. Metrics were stratified into binary groups based on previously established structure-specific expert-derived interobserver variability (IOV) cutoffs. Generalized linear mixed-effects models using Markov chain Monte Carlo Bayesian estimation were used to investigate the association between demographic variables and the binarized segmentation quality for each disease site separately. Variables with a highest density interval excluding zero - loosely analogous to frequentist significance - were considered to substantially impact the outcome measure.

resultsAfter filtering by practicing radiation oncologists, 574, 110, 452, 112, and 48 structure observations remained for the breast, sarcoma, H&N, GYN, and GI cases, respectively. The median percentage of observations that crossed the expert DSC IOV cutoff when stratified by structure type was 55% and 31% for OARs and tumor volumes, respectively. Bayesian regression analysis revealed tumor category had a substantial negative impact on binarized DSC for the breast (coefficient mean ± standard deviation: -0.97 ± 0.20), sarcoma (-1.04 ± 0.54), H&N (-1.00 ± 0.24), and GI (-2.95 ± 0.98) cases. There were no clear recurring relationships between segmentation quality and demographic variables across the cases, with most variables demonstrating large standard deviations and wide highest density intervals.

conclusionOur study highlights substantial uncertainty surrounding conventionally presumed factors influencing segmentation quality. Future studies should investigate additional demographic variables, more patients and imaging modalities, and alternative metrics of segmentation acceptability.