PhD ceremony Alessia de Biase: AI in head and neck radiotherapy
| When: | Mo 04-11-2024 at 14:30 |
| Where: | Academy Building UG |
Artificial intelligence in head and neck radiotherapy, towards personalized treatment
Head and neck cancer is the seventh most common cancer worldwide. Radiotherapy is often the preferred treatment because it helps preserve nearby organs.
Treatment planning for radiotherapy relies heavily on multi-modality medical images like CT, PET and MRI, creating a vast amount of information with significant potential for further analysis. Recently, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has shown promise in analyzing these complex datasets, which could lead to a more effective treatment and better outcomes.
This thesis of Alessia de Biase developed deep learning (DL) techniques for two key tasks: tumor contouring and prediction of tumor-related endpoints. For tumor contouring, DL methods were developed to assist radiation oncologists in accurately identifying head and neck tumors on PET/CT. Tumor probability maps were introduced to visually show how confident the DL model is in its predictions at the voxel level. An interactive user interface was designed to integrate these tools into clinical practice, and its effectiveness was tested by radiation oncologists.