A Fully Automated CT-Guided Learning for Survival Prediction of Esophageal Cancer

Accurately predicting survival of esophageal cancer is essential for clinical precision treatment. However, the existing region of interest (ROI) based methods not only require prior medical knowledge to complete the delineation of tumor, but may also lead to excessive sensitivity of the model towards ROI. To address these challenges, we design a fully automated CT-guided learning that combines a CNN-Transformer size aware U-Net and a ranked survival prediction network together to automatically predict the survival of patients with esophageal cancer. Specifically, we first incorporate the Transformer with shifted windowing multi-head self-attention mechanism into the base of the encoder in the U-Net to capture the long-range dependency in the 3D CT images. Then, to alleviate the imbalance between the ROI and the background in CT images, we design a size-aware coefficient for the segmentation loss. Finally, we design a ranked pair sorting loss to learn more fully the ranked information hidden in esophageal cancer patients. To validate the effectiveness of our method, we conduct extensive experiments on a dataset containing 759 esophageal cancer samples. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can still achieve the best performance in survival prediction without ROI ground truth.