What is this research about?
At the department of radiotherapy, a radiation treatment plan is made for every individual patient based on imaging scans. The tumour and organs at risk are delineated to optimise dose to the target and minimise dose to healthy surrounding tissue. However, manual delineation is time-consuming, so we have implemented automated delineation with a deep learning (DL) model since 2018. But DL segmentation models do not have perfect accuracy for all patients and structures. Therefore, all DL segmentations have to be evaluated by clinicians. This partially diminishes the time-efficiency of the DL model implementation. Furthermore, this is a limiting factor in the adoption of online adaptive treatment, where a new treatment plan is made for each patient based on daily imaging.
Therefore, there is a growing interest in methods to automatically assess the quality of DL segmentation and provide this confidence indication to the clinicians that evaluate the segmentations. Recent research within the UMCG and other hospitals focuses on developing an auto-QA system. This system will consist of multiple layers that detect when and where the model makes errors and what the consequences of these errors are for the patient’s treatment plan.
At the moment, we have developed a reliable method for detecting local mistakes of a model. However, we are also interested in adding an extra layer to the auto-QA system that detects if the model is applied to the right patient (i.e., if the patient was within the training distribution of the model). Recent literature suggests multiple methods that could be suitable for out-of-distribution detection.
Therefore, we are looking for a master thesis student who wants to contribute to this research.