Image segmentation of the liver is an important step in treatment planning for liver cancer. However, manual segmentation at a large scale is not practical, leading to increasing reliance on deep learning models to automatically segment the liver. This manuscript develops a generalizable deep learning model to segment the liver on T1-weighted MR images. In particular, three distinct deep learning architectures (nnUNet, PocketNet, Swin UNETR) were considered using data gathered from six geographically different institutions. A total of 819 T1-weighted MR images were gathered from both public and internal sources. Our experiments compared each architecture's testing performance when trained both intra-institutionally and inter-institutionally. Models trained using nnUNet and its PocketNet variant achieved mean Dice-Sorensen similarity coefficients>0.9 on both intra- and inter-institutional test set data. The performance of these models suggests that nnUNet and PocketNet liver segmentation models trained on a large and diverse collection of T1-weighted MR images would on average achieve good intra-institutional segmentation performance.
Keywords: Deep learning; Liver model; Liver segmentation; Multi-dataset training; Robustness; T1-weighted MRI.
© 2024. The Author(s).