ASSET: Auto-Segmentation of the Seventeen SEgments for Ventricular Tachycardia Ablation in Radiation Therapy

Abstract

There has been a recent effort to treat high-risk ventricular tachycardia (VT) patients through radio-ablation. However, manual segmentation of the VT target is complex and time-consuming. This work introduces ASSET, or Auto-segmentation of the Seventeen SEgments for Tachycardia ablation, to aid in radiation therapy (RT) planning. ASSET was retrospectively applied to CTs for 26 thoracic RT patients (13 undergoing VT ablation). The physician-defined parasternal long-axis of the left ventricle (LV) and the axes generated from principal component analysis (PCA) were compared using mean distance to agreement (MDA) and angle of separation. The manually selected right ventricle insertion point and LVs were used to apply the ASSET model to automatically generate the 17 segments of the LV myocardium (LVM). Physician-defined parasternal long-axis differed from PCA by 1.2 ± 0.3 mm MDA and 6.9 ± 0.7 degrees. Segments differed by 0.69 ± 0.29 mm MDA and 0.89 ± 0.03 Dice similarity coefficient. Running ASSET takes 2 h/patient. Agreement between ASSET and expert contours was comparable to inter-observer variability. Qualitative scoring conducted by three experts revealed automatically generated segmentations were clinically useable as-is. ASSET offers efficient and reliable automatic segmentations for the 17 segments of the LVM for target generation in RT planning.

Keywords

• radiation therapy
• cardiac ablation
• ventricular tachycardia
• automatic segmentation