A Deep Learning Model For Automatic Posterior Fossa Pediatric Brain Tumor Segmentation: A Multi-Institutional Study

Abstract BACKGROUND Brain tumors are the most common solid malignancies in childhood, many of which develop in the posterior fossa (PF). Manual tumor measurements are frequently required to optimize registration into surgical navigation systems or for surveillance of nonresectable tumors after therapy. With recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), automated MRI-based tumor segmentation is now feasible without requiring manual measurements. Our goal was to create a deep learning model for automated PF tumor segmentation that can register into navigation systems and provide volume output. METHODS 720 pre-surgical MRI scans from five pediatric centers were divided into training, validation, and testing datasets. The study cohort comprised of four PF tumor types: medulloblastoma, diffuse midline glioma, ependymoma, and brainstem or cerebellar pilocytic astrocytoma. Manual segmentation of the tumors by an attending neuroradiologist served as “ground truth” labels for model training and evaluation. We used 2D Unet, an encoder-decoder convolutional neural network architecture, with a pre-trained ResNet50 encoder. We assessed ventricle segmentation accuracy on a held-out test set using Dice similarity coefficient (0–1) and compared ventricular volume calculation between manual and model-derived segmentations using linear regression. RESULTS Compared to the ground truth expert human segmentation, overall Dice score for model performance accuracy was 0.83 for automatic delineation of the 4 tumor types. CONCLUSIONS In this multi-institutional study, we present a deep learning algorithm that automatically delineates PF tumors and outputs volumetric information. Our results demonstrate applied AI that is clinically applicable, potentially augmenting radiologists, neuro-oncologists, and neurosurgeons for tumor evaluation, surveillance, and surgical planning.