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Dawid Schellingerhout

Publications and source records attributed to Dawid Schellingerhout.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

Pre- and Post-Treatment Glioma Segmentation with the Medical Imaging Segmentation Toolkit

Medical image segmentation continues to advance rapidly, yet rigorous comparison between methods remains challenging due to a lack of standardized and customizable tooling. In this work, we present the current state of the Medical Imaging Segmentation Toolkit (MIST), with a particular focus on its flexible and modular postprocessing framework designed for the BraTS 2025 pre- and post-treatment glioma segmentation challenge. Since its debut in the 2024 BraTS adult glioma post-treatment segmentation challenge, MIST's postprocessing module has been significantly extended to support a wide range of transforms, including removal or replacement of small objects, extraction of the largest connected components, and morphological operations such as hole filling and closing. These transforms can be composed into user-defined strategies, enabling fine-grained control over the final segmentation output. We evaluate three such strategies - ranging from simple small-object removal to more complex, class-specific pipelines - and rank their performance using the BraTS ranking protocol. Our results highlight how MIST facilitates rapid experimentation and targeted refinement, ultimately producing high-quality segmentations for the BraTS 2025 challenge. MIST remains open source and extensible, supporting reproducible and scalable research in medical image segmentation.

cs.CV

MIST: A Simple and Scalable End-To-End 3D Medical Imaging Segmentation Framework

Medical imaging segmentation is a highly active area of research, with deep learning-based methods achieving state-of-the-art results in several benchmarks. However, the lack of standardized tools for training, testing, and evaluating new methods makes the comparison of methods difficult. To address this, we introduce the Medical Imaging Segmentation Toolkit (MIST), a simple, modular, and end-to-end medical imaging segmentation framework designed to facilitate consistent training, testing, and evaluation of deep learning-based medical imaging segmentation methods. MIST standardizes data analysis, preprocessing, and evaluation pipelines, accommodating multiple architectures and loss functions. This standardization ensures reproducible and fair comparisons across different methods. We detail MIST's data format requirements, pipelines, and auxiliary features and demonstrate its efficacy using the BraTS Adult Glioma Post-Treatment Challenge dataset. Our results highlight MIST's ability to produce accurate segmentation masks and its scalability across multiple GPUs, showcasing its potential as a powerful tool for future medical imaging research and development.

eess.IV

Deep Learning-Based Automated Post-Operative Gross Tumor Volume Segmentation in Glioblastoma Patients

Precise automated delineation of post-operative gross tumor volume in glioblastoma cases is challenging and time-consuming owing to the presence of edema and the deformed brain tissue resulting from the surgical tumor resection. To develop a model for automated delineation of post-operative gross tumor volumes in glioblastoma, we proposed a novel 3D double pocket U-Net architecture that has two parallel pocket U-Nets. Both U-Nets were trained simultaneously with two different subsets of MRI sequences and the output from the models was combined to do the final prediction. We strategically combined the MRI input sequences (T1, T2, T1C, FL) for model training to achieve improved segmentation accuracy. The dataset comprised 82 post-operative studies collected from 23 glioblastoma patients who underwent maximal safe tumor resection. All had gross tumor volume (GTV) segmentations performed by human experts, and these were used as a reference standard. The results of 3D double pocket U-Net were compared with baseline 3D pocket U-Net models and the ensemble of 3D pocket U-Net models. All the models were evaluated with fivefold cross-validation in terms of the Dice similarity coefficient and Hausdorff distance. Our proposed double U-Net model trained with input sequences [T1, T1C, FL + T2, T1C] achieved a better mean Dice score of 0.8585 and Hausdorff distance of 4.1942 compared to all the baseline models and ensemble models trained. The presence of infiltrating tumors and vasogenic edema in the post-operative MRI scans tends to reduce segmentation accuracy when considering the MRI sequences T1, T2, T1C, and FL together for model training. The double U-Net approach of combining subsets of the MRI sequences as distinct inputs for model training improves segmentation accuracy by 7% when compared with the conventional method of model training with all four sequences.

eess.IV

PocketNet: A Smaller Neural Network for Medical Image Analysis

Medical imaging deep learning models are often large and complex, requiring specialized hardware to train and evaluate these models. To address such issues, we propose the PocketNet paradigm to reduce the size of deep learning models by throttling the growth of the number of channels in convolutional neural networks. We demonstrate that, for a range of segmentation and classification tasks, PocketNet architectures produce results comparable to that of conventional neural networks while reducing the number of parameters by multiple orders of magnitude, using up to 90% less GPU memory, and speeding up training times by up to 40%, thereby allowing such models to be trained and deployed in resource-constrained settings.

eess.IV

Mutual-Information Based Optimal Experimental Design for Hyperpolarized $^{13}$C-Pyruvate MRI

A key parameter of interest recovered from hyperpolarized (HP) MRI measurements is the apparent pyruvate-to-lactate exchange rate, $k_{PL}$, for measuring tumor metabolism. This manuscript presents an information-theory-based optimal experimental design (OED) approach that minimizes the uncertainty in the rate parameter, $k_{PL}$, recovered from HP-MRI measurements. Mutual information (MI) is employed to measure the information content of the HP measurements with respect to the first-order exchange kinetics of the pyruvate conversion to lactate. Flip angles of the pulse sequence acquisition are optimized with respect to the mutual information. Further, a spatially varying model (high-fidelity) based on the Block-Torrey equations is proposed and utilized as a control. A time-varying flip angle scheme leads to a higher parameter optimization that can further improve the quantitative value of mutual information over a constant flip angle scheme. However, the constant flip angle scheme leads to the best accuracy and precision when considering inference from noise-corrupted data. For the particular MRI data examined here, pyruvate and lactate flip angles of 35 and 28 degrees, respectively, were the best choice in terms of accuracy and precision of the parameter recovery. Moreover, the recovery of rate parameter $k_{PL}$ from the data generated from the high-fidelity model highlights the influence of diffusion and strength of vascular source on the recovered rate parameter. Since the existing pharmacokinetic models for HP-MRI do not account for spatial variation, the optimized design parameters may not be fully optimal in a more general 3D setting.

cs.IT