arXiv · 2610.23568
From Adult Renal Masses to Pediatric Wilms Tumors: Evaluating Cross-Domain Generalization of Kidney Lesion Segmentation on MRI
Abstract
Deep learning segmentation models for pediatric oncology are often trained on small, single-center cohorts, whereas much larger datasets exist for adult diseases, such as kidney cancer. Whether models trained on adult renal lesions generalize to pediatric Wilms tumors remains unclear. We trained a segmentation model on single-sequence T1- or T2-weighted adult kidney MRI and evaluated it on a held-out adult test set and a pediatric Wilms tumor cohort, where it was compared with a pediatric-specific nnU-Net. Segmentation performance was quantified using the Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and 95th-percentile Hausdorff distance. On the adult test set, the model achieved a median DSC of 0.86 for renal lesions. On the pediatric cohort, the adult-trained model achieved a median DSC of 0.85 compared with 0.90 for the pediatric-specific model. Despite differences in age, anatomy, and tumor type, the adult-trained model showed promising performance on pediatric Wilms tumors, with only a modest difference in median DSC compared with the pediatric-specific model. However, non-inferiority could not be shown, highlighting the value of pediatric training data. In future work, a fine-tuning strategy could be explored.
Explore related subjects
Keep this discovery
Explore connections, maps & timelines
Sarah de Boer, Myrthe A. D. Buser, Hartmut Häntze, Jawed Nawabi, Lisa C. Adams, Alida F. W. van der Steeg, Marry M. van den Heuvel-Eibrink, Annemieke S. Littooij, Keno K. Bressem, Mathias Prokop, Alessa Hering. 2026-10-16. From Adult Renal Masses to Pediatric Wilms Tumors: Evaluating Cross-Domain Generalization of Kidney Lesion Segmentation on MRI. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23568
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.