Deep Learning for the Automatic Segmentation of Extracranial Venous Malformations of the Head and Neck from MR Images Using 3D U-Net.

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Abstract

It is difficult to characterize extracranial venous malformations (VMs) of the head and neck region from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) manually and one at a time. We attempted to perform the automatic segmentation of lesions from MRI of extracranial VMs using a convolutional neural network as a deep learning tool.T2-weighted MRI from 53 patients with extracranial VMs in the head and neck region was used for annotations. Preprocessing management was performed before training. Three-dimensional U-Net was used as a segmentation model. Dice similarity coefficients were evaluated along with other indicators.Dice similarity coefficients in 3D U-Net were found to be 99.75% in the training set and 60.62% in the test set. The models showed overfitting, which can be resolved with a larger number of objects, i.e., MRI VM images.Our pilot study showed sufficient potential for the automatic segmentation of extracranial VMs through deep learning using MR images from VM patients. The overfitting phenomenon observed will be resolved with a larger number of MRI VM images.