Leveraging anatomical priors for automated pancreas segmentation on abdominal CT

An accurate segmentation of the pancreas on CT is crucial to identify pancreatic pathologies and extract imaging-based biomarkers. However, prior research on pancreas segmentation has primarily focused on modifying the segmentation model architecture or utilizing pre- and post-processing techniques. In this article, we investigate the utility of anatomical priors to enhance the segmentation performance of the pancreas. Two 3D full-resolution nnU-Net models were trained, one with 8 refined labels from the public PANORAMA dataset, and another that combined them with labels derived from the public TotalSegmentator (TS) tool. The addition of anatomical priors resulted in a 6% increase in Dice score (p < .001) and a 36.5 mm decrease in Hausdorff distance for pancreas segmentation (p < .001). Moreover, the pancreas was always detected when anatomy priors were used, whereas there were 8 instances of failed detections without their use. The use of anatomy priors shows promise for pancreas segmentation and subsequent derivation of imaging biomarkers.