Automated Upper Tract Urothelial Carcinoma Tumor Segmentation During Ureteroscopy Using Computer Vision Techniques.

Abstract

Endoscopic tumor ablation of upper tract urothelial carcinoma (UTUC) allows for tumor control with the benefit of renal preservation but is impacted by intraoperative visibility. We sought to develop a computer vision model for real-time, automated segmentation of UTUC tumors to augment visualization during treatment. We collected twenty videos of endoscopic treatment of UTUC from two institutions. Frames from each video (N=3387) were extracted and manually annotated to identify tumors and areas of ablated tumor. Three established computer vision models (U-Net, U-Net++ and UNext) were trained using these annotated frames and compared. Eighty percent of the data was used to train the models while 10% was used for both validation and testing. We evaluated the highest performing model for tumor and ablated tissue segmentation using a pixel-based analysis. The model and a video overlay depicting tumor segmentation were further evaluated intraoperatively. All twenty videos (mean 36 seconds ± 58s) demonstrated tumor identification and 12 depicted areas of ablated tumor. The U-Net model demonstrated the best performance for segmentation of both tumors (AUC-ROC of 0.96) and areas of ablated tumor (AUC-ROC of 0.90). Additionally, we implemented a working system to process real-time video feeds and overlay model predictions intraoperatively. The model was able to annotate new videos at 15 fps. Computer vision models demonstrate excellent real-time performance for automated upper tract urothelial tumor segmentation during ureteroscopy.