Evidence map›Paper›PMID 39401180›Full record

ArticleJournal of applied clinical medical physics2025

Clinical target volume (CTV) automatic delineation using deep learning network for cervical cancer radiotherapy: A study with external validation.

Zhe Wu, Dong Wang, Cheng Xu, Shengxian Peng, Lihua Deng, Mujun Liu, Yi Wu

Abstract readValidation Study
In one paragraph

Article in Journal of applied clinical medical physics, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.

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5citing papers in PubMed
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3 · Its place in the literature

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5 citing papers in PubMed.

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5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

7 authors.

Zhe WuDepartment of Digital Medicine, School of Biomedical Engineering and Medical Imaging, Army Medical University (Third Military Medical University), Chongqing, China.ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5191-0248
Dong WangDepartment of Radiation Oncology, Zigong First People's Hospital, Sichuan, China.
Cheng XuDepartment of Radiotherapy, Beijing Luhe Hospital, Beijing, China.
Shengxian PengDepartment of Radiation Oncology, Zigong First People's Hospital, Sichuan, China.
Lihua DengDepartment of Digital Medicine, School of Biomedical Engineering and Medical Imaging, Army Medical University (Third Military Medical University), Chongqing, China.
Mujun LiuDepartment of Digital Medicine, School of Biomedical Engineering and Medical Imaging, Army Medical University (Third Military Medical University), Chongqing, China.
Yi WuDepartment of Digital Medicine, School of Biomedical Engineering and Medical Imaging, Army Medical University (Third Military Medical University), Chongqing, China.

Funding

Chongqing Key Research and Development Program CSTB2022TIAD-KPX0181Chongqing Natural Science Foundation cstc2021jcyj-msxmX0965Chongqing Science and Technology Talent Project CQYC201905037National Natural Science Foundation of China 31971113
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

purposeTo explore the accuracy and feasibility of a proposed deep learning (DL) algorithm for clinical target volume (CTV) delineation in cervical cancer radiotherapy and evaluate whether it can perform well in external cervical cancer and endometrial cancer cases for generalization validation.

methodsA total of 332 patients were enrolled in this study. A state-of-the-art network called ResCANet, which added the cascade multi-scale convolution in the skip connections to eliminate semantic differences between different feature layers based on ResNet-UNet. The atrous spatial pyramid pooling in the deepest feature layer combined the semantic information of different receptive fields without losing information. A total of 236 cervical cancer cases were randomly grouped into 5-fold cross-training (n = 189) and validation (n = 47) cohorts. External validations were performed in a separate cohort of 54 cervical cancer and 42 endometrial cancer cases. The performances of the proposed network were evaluated by dice similarity coefficient (DSC), sensitivity (SEN), positive predictive value (PPV), 95% Hausdorff distance (95HD), and oncologist clinical score when comparing them with manual delineation in validation cohorts.

resultsIn internal validation cohorts, the mean DSC, SEN, PPV, 95HD for ResCANet achieved 74.8%, 81.5%, 73.5%, and 10.5 mm. In external independent validation cohorts, ResCANet achieved 73.4%, 72.9%, 75.3%, 12.5 mm for cervical cancer cases and 77.1%, 81.1%, 75.5%, 10.3 mm for endometrial cancer cases, respectively. The clinical assessment score showed that minor and no revisions (delineation time was shortened to within 30 min) accounted for about 85% of all cases in DL-aided automatic delineation.

conclusionsWe demonstrated the problem of model generalizability for DL-based automatic delineation. The proposed network can improve the performance of automatic delineation for cervical cancer and shorten manual delineation time at no expense to quality. The network showed excellent clinical viability, which can also be even generalized for endometrial cancer with excellent performance.

Indexed as

AlgorithmsDeep LearningRadiotherapy DosageRadiotherapy, Intensity-ModulatedRadiotherapy Planning, Computer-AssistedUterine Cervical NeoplasmsAdultAgedEndometrial NeoplasmsFemaleHumansImage Processing, Computer-AssistedMiddle AgedNeural Networks, ComputerOrgans at RiskPrognosisauto‐delineationcervical cancer radiotherapyclinical target volumedeep learninggeneralization

Identifiers

PMID39401180
PMCPMC11712972

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