LNQ Challenge 2023: Learning Mediastinal Lymph Node Segmentation with a Probabilistic Lymph Node Atlas

Abstract: The evaluation of lymph node metastases plays a crucial role in achieving precise cancer staging, influencing subsequent decisions regarding treatment options. Lymph node detection poses challenges due to the presence of unclear boundaries and the diverse range of sizes and morphological characteristics, making it a resource-intensive process. As part of the LNQ 2023 MICCAI challenge, we propose the use of anatomical priors as a tool to address the challenges that persist in mediastinal lymph node segmentation in combination with the partial annotation of the challenge training data. The model ensemble using all suggested modifications yields a Dice score of 0.6033 and segments 57% of the ground truth lymph nodes, compared to 27% when training on CT only. Segmentation accuracy is improved significantly by incorporating a probabilistic lymph node atlas in loss weighting and post-processing. The largest performance gains are achieved by oversampling fully annotated data to account for the partial annotation of the challenge training data, as well as adding additional data augmentation to address the high heterogeneity of the CT images and lymph node appearance. Our code is available at https://github.com/MICAI-IMI-UzL/LNQ2023.