DeepEC: An error correction framework for dose prediction and organ segmentation using deep neural networks

Radiotherapy is an indispensable part of adjuvant therapy for cancer that improves local control, overall survival, and the opportunity for good quality of life. Organ delineation and dose plan design are the key steps in the treatment. Organ delineation controls the area of radiotherapy and dose planning controls its intensity. However, both tasks are time-consuming, exhausting, and subjective, and automated methods are desirable. Although automated methods have been studied, the previous studies either focus on organ segmentation or dose prediction, without considering them from a holistic perspective. In this paper, we treat organ segmentation and dose prediction as similar tasks, and propose an error correction framework to improve their performance based on the same mechanism. The proposed error correction framework consists of a prediction network and a calibration network. The biggest difference between our framework and previous studies is that the state-of-the-art networks can be used as a prediction network or calibration network, and then the performance can be improved by the error correction mechanism. To evaluate the framework, we conducted a series of experiments on dose prediction and organ segmentation. These experimental results show that the framework is superior to other state-of-the-art methods in both tasks.