Abstract
Introduction
Artificial intelligence-based tools can significantly impact detection and segmentation of brain metastases for stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS). VBrain is a deep learning algorithm, recently FDA-cleared, to assist in brain tumor contouring. In this study, we aimed to further validate this tool in patients treated with SRS for brain metastases at Stanford Cancer Center.
Methods
We included randomly selected patients with brain metastases treated with SRS from 2008 to 2020. Computed tomography (CT) and axial T1-weighted post-contrast magnetic resonance (MR) image data were extracted for each patient and uploaded to VBrain. Subsequent analyses compared the output contours from VBrain with the physician-defined contours used for SRS. A brain metastasis was considered “detected” when the VBrain “predicted” contours overlapped with the corresponding physician contours (“ground-truth” contours). We evaluated performance against ground-truth contours using the following metrics: lesion-wise Dice similarity coefficient (DSC), lesion-wise average Hausdorff distance (AVD), false positive count (FP), and lesion-wise sensitivity (%).
Results
We analyzed 60 patients with 321 intact brain metastases treated over 70 SRS courses. Resection cavities were excluded from the analysis. The median (range) tumor size was 132 mm3 (7 to 24,765). Input CT scan slice thickness was 1.250 mm, and median (range) pixel resolution was 0.547 mm (0.457 to 0.977). Input MR scan median (range) slice thickness was 1.000 mm (0.940 to 2.000), and median (range) pixel resolution was 0.469 mm (0.469 to 1.094). In assessing VBrain performance, we found mean lesion-wise DSC to be 0.70, mean lesion-wise AVD to be 9.40% of lesion size (0.805 mm), mean FP to be 0.657 tumors per case, and lesion-wise sensitivity to be 84.5%.
Conclusion
Retrospective analysis of our brain metastases cohort using a deep learning algorithm yielded promising results. Integration of VBrain into the clinical workflow can provide further clinical and research insights.
Validation of Deep-Learning Based Auto-segmentation of the Lens, Optic Nerves, and Chiasm for Stereotactic Radiosurgery