One Shot PACS: Patient Specific Anatomic Context and Shape Prior Aware Recurrent Registration-Segmentation of Longitudinal Thoracic Cone Beam CTs

Image-guided adaptive lung radiotherapy requires accurate tumor and organs segmentation from during treatment cone-beam CT (CBCT) images. Thoracic CBCTs are hard to segment because of low soft-tissue contrast, imaging artifacts, respiratory motion, and large treatment induced intra-thoracic anatomic changes. Hence, we developed a novel Patient-specific Anatomic Context and Shape prior or PACS-aware 3D recurrent registration-segmentation network for longitudinal thoracic CBCT segmentation. Segmentation and registration networks were concurrently trained in an end-to-end framework and implemented with convolutional long-short term memory models. The registration network was trained in an unsupervised manner using pairs of planning CT (pCT) and CBCT images and produced a progressively deformed sequence of images. The segmentation network was optimized in a one-shot setting by combining progressively deformed pCT (anatomic context) and pCT delineations (shape context) with CBCT images. Our method, one-shot PACS was significantly more accurate (p <0.001) for tumor (DSC of 0.83 ± 0.08, surface DSC [sDSC] of 0.97 ± 0.06, and Hausdorff distance at 95th percentile [HD95] of 3.97±3.02mm) and the esophagus (DSC of 0.78 ± 0.13, sDSC of 0.90±0.14, HD95 of 3.22±2.02) segmentation than multiple methods. Ablation tests and comparative experiments were also done.