Fully automated segmentation and volumetric measurement of ocular adnexal lymphoma by deep learning-based self-configuring nnU-net on multi-sequence MRI: a multi-center study

To evaluate nnU-net’s performance in automatically segmenting and volumetrically measuring ocular adnexal lymphoma (OAL) on multi-sequence MRI.

We collected T1-weighted (T1), T2-weighted and T1-weighted contrast-enhanced images with/without fat saturation (T2_FS/T2_nFS, T1c_FS/T1c_nFS) of OAL from four institutions. Two radiologists manually annotated lesions as the ground truth using ITK-SNAP. A deep learning framework, nnU-net, was developed and trained using two models. Model 1 was trained on T1, T2, and T1c, while Model 2 was trained exclusively on T1 and T2. A 5-fold cross-validation was utilized in the training process. Segmentation performance was evaluated using the Dice similarity coefficient (DSC), sensitivity, and positive prediction value (PPV). Volumetric assessment was performed using Bland-Altman plots and Lin’s concordance correlation coefficient (CCC).

A total of 147 patients from one center were selected as training set and 33 patients from three centers were regarded as test set. For both Model 1 and 2, nnU-net demonstrated outstanding segmentation performance on T2_FS with DSC of 0.80–0.82, PPV of 84.5–86.1%, and sensitivity of 77.6–81.2%, respectively. Model 2 failed to detect 19 cases of T1c, whereas the DSC, PPV, and sensitivity for T1_nFS were 0.59, 91.2%, and 51.4%, respectively. Bland–Altman plots revealed minor tumor volume differences with 0.22–1.24 cm³ between nnU-net prediction and ground truth on T2_FS. The CCC were 0.96 and 0.93 in Model 1 and 2 for T2_FS images, respectively.

The nnU-net offered excellent performance in automated segmentation and volumetric assessment in MRI of OAL, particularly on T2_FS images.