Condition-Based Ensemble Modelling of Swin UNETR and 3D U-Net for Meningioma Segmentation in Radiotherapy Planning
摘要
Segmentation of meningioma tumors is important for effective radiotherapy planning. Despite recent advances in medical image segmentation, automatic and accurate segmentation of meningioma tumors on T1-contrast-enhanced (T1CE) MRI sequences remains a challenge, particularly across varied tumor shapes and sizes. This study proposed an automatic segmentation of meningioma on T1CE MRI, as a part of the BraTS-Lighthouse 2025 Meningioma Radiotherapy Segmentation Task, by leveraging state-of-the-art deep learning architectures. In the current study, two deep learning 3D segmentation networks, 3D U-Net and Swin UNETR, were trained on T1CE brain MRI volumes of 500 patients provided by BraTS-Lighthouse 2025, followed by fine-tuning of models. Further, a condition-based ensemble strategy is implemented for combining Swin UNETR and 3D U-Net to achieve an optimum Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC). Individual model evaluation showed that Swin UNETR outperformed the 3D U-Net. On the local training dataset comprising 50 patients, the optimized Swin UNETR achieved a lesion-wise DSC of 0.81 ± 0.18, compared to 0.74 ± 0.23 for the optimized 3D U-Net. Similarly, on the external validation dataset of 70 patients, Swin UNETR achieved a DSC of 0.65 ± 0.29, while 3D U-Net obtained 0.61 ± 0.33. Furthermore, both models are condition-based ensembled for the final predictions, the ensemble model provides a lesion-wise DSC of 0.83 ± 0.13 on local training dataset of 50 patients and lesion-wise DSC of 0.70 ± 0.28 for the external validation dataset of 70 patients. Our study describes the effectiveness of condition-based ensemble using a transformer-based (Swin UNETR) and convolutional neural network-based (3D U-Net) models for Gross Tumor Volume (GTV) segmentation of meningioma tumors in MRI scans.