Gregory Sharp | Searcharxiv

arXiv2025

Ising energy model for the stochastic prediction of tumor islets

A major challenge in diagnosing and treating cancer is the infiltrative growth of tumors into surrounding tissues. This microscopic spread of the disease is invisible on most diagnostic imaging modalities and can often only be detected histologically in biopsies. The purpose of this paper is to develop a physically based model of tumor spread that captures the histologically observed behavior in terms of seeding small tumor islets in prostate cancer. The model is based on three elementary events: a tumor cell can move, duplicate, or die. The propensity of each event is given by an Ising-like Hamiltonian that captures correlations between neighboring cells. The model parameters were fitted to clinical data obtained from surgical specimens taken from 23 prostate cancer patients. The results demonstrate that this straightforward physical model effectively describes the distribution of the size and the number of tumor islets in prostate cancer. The simulated tumor islets exhibit a regular, approximately spherical shape, correctly mimicking the shapes observed in histology. This is due to the Ising interaction term between neighboring cells acting as a surface tension that gives rise to regularly shaped islets. The model addresses the important clinical need of calculating the probability of tumor involvement in specific sub-volumes of the prostate, which is required for radiation treatment planning and other applications.

physics.med-ph↗

arXiv2020

Using constraint structure and an improved object detection network to detect the 12^{th} Vertebra from CT images with a limited field of view for image-guided radiotherapy

Image guidance has been widely used in radiation therapy. Correctly identifying the bounding box of the anatomical landmarks from limited field of views is the key to success. In image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT), the detection of those landmarks like the 12th vertebra (T12) still requires tedious manual inspections and annotations; and superior-inferior misalignment to the wrong vertebral body is still relatively common. It is necessary to develop an automated approach to detect those landmarks from images. The challenges of training a model to identify T12 vertebrae automatically mainly are high shape similarity between T12 and neighboring vertebrae, limited annotated data, and class imbalance. This study proposed a novel 3D detection network, requiring only a small amount of training data. Our approach has the following innovations, including 1) the introduction of an auxiliary network to build constraint feature map for improving the model's generalization, especially when the constraint structure is easier to be detected than the main one; 2) an improved detection head and target functions for accurate bounding box detection; and 3) an improved loss functions to address the high class imbalance. Our proposed network was trained, validated and tested on anotated CT images from 55 patients and demonstrated accurate distinguish T12 vertebra from its neighboring vertebrae of high shape similarity. Our proposed algorithm yielded the bounding box center and size errors of 3.98\pm2.04mm and 16.83\pm8.34mm, respectively. Our approach significantly outperformed state-of-the-arts Retina-Net3D in average precision (AP) at IoU thresholds of 0.35 and 0.5, with AP increasing from 0 to 95.4 and 0 to 64.7, respectively. In summary, our approach has a great potential to be integrated into the clinical workflow to improve the safety of IGRT.

cs.CV↗