Segmentation of Peripancreatic Arteries in Multispectral Computed Tomography Imaging

Alina Dima, Johannes C. Paetzold, Friederike Jungmann, Tristan Lemke, Philipp Raffler, Georgios Kaissis, Daniel Rueckert, Rickmer Braren

Abstract: Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma is an aggressive form of cancer with a poor prognosis, where the operability and hence chance of survival is strongly affected by the tumor infiltration of the arteries. In an effort to enable an automated analysis of the relationship between the local arteries and the tumor, we propose a method for segmenting the peripancreatic arteries in multispectral CT images in the arterial phase. A clinical dataset was collected, and we designed a fast semi-manual annotation procedure, which requires around 20 min of annotation time per case. Next, we trained a U-Net based model to perform binary segmentation of the peripancreatic arteries, where we obtained a near perfect segmentation with a Dice score of $$95.05\%$$ in our best performing model. Furthermore, we designed a clinical evaluation procedure for our models; performed by two radiologists, yielding a complete segmentation of $$85.31\%$$ of the clinically relevant arteries, thereby confirming the clinical relevance of our method.