Learning Transferability in Deep Segmentation of Liver Metastases

The ability to transfer knowledge and models across different datasets and clinical scenarios is of paramount importance in medical imaging. This is especially true for liver lesion segmentation which is crucial for pre-operative planning and treatment follow-up. Despite the progress of deep learning algorithms using Transformers, automatically segmenting small hepatic metastases remains a persistent challenge. This can be attributed to the degradation of small structures due to the intrinsic process of feature down-sampling inherent to many architectures as well as class imbalance. While similar challenges have been observed for liver tumors originated from hepatocellular carcinoma, their manifestation in the context of liver metastasis delineation remains under-investigated. Through comprehensive experiments, this paper aims to bridge this gap and to demonstrate the impact of various transfer learning schemes from off-the-shelf datasets to a dataset containing liver metastases only. Our scale-specific evaluation reveals that models trained from scratch or with domain-specific pre-training demonstrate greater proficiency.