Disentangled PET Lesion Segmentation

Abstract

PET imaging is an invaluable tool in clinical settings as it captures the functional activity of both healthy anatomy and cancerous lesions. Developing automatic lesion segmentation methods for PET images is crucial since manual lesion segmentation is laborious and prone to inter- and intra-observer variability. We propose PET-Disentangler, a 3D disentanglement method that uses a 3D UNet-like encoder-decoder architecture to disentangle disease and normal healthy anatomical features with losses for segmentation, reconstruction, and healthy component plausibility. A critic network is used to encourage the healthy latent features to match the distribution of healthy samples and thus encourages these features to not contain any lesion-related features. Our quantitative results show that PET-Disentangler is less prone to incorrectly declaring healthy and high tracer uptake regions as cancerous lesions, since such uptake pattern would be assigned to the disentangled healthy component.