TECHNICAL REPORT FOR THE HECKTOR25 CHALLENGE: TEAM CDS

Jakob Dexl, Michael Ingrisch

Keywords: Head and neck cancer, PET/CT, Segmentation, FDG

TL;DR: This report presents the submissions of Team CDS to the HECKTOR 2025 challenge.

Abstract:

This paper describes our submissions to the HECKTOR
2025 challenge, which addresses three tasks: (1) tumor and lymph node
segmentation, (2) recurrence-free survival prediction, and (3) HPV status
classification. For Task 1, we trained a baseline UNet and refined the final
model using stochastic weight averaging and small lesion removal. For
Task 2, we employed a lightweight 3D ResNet18 that combines PET, CT,
segmentation masks, and clinical metadata, optimized with a Cox loss.
For Task 3, we extended the segmentation model with a classification
head and metadata integration. Cross-validation results were promising,
performance on the preliminary validation set was however lower, under-
lining the challenges of generalization in multi-center cohorts. Code and
trained models are available at github.com/JakobDexl/HECKTOR25

Submission Number: 12