Generating Novel Pituitary Datasets from Open-Source Imaging Data and Deep Volumetric Segmentation

Purpose: The estimated incidence of pituitary adenomas in the general population is 10 to 30%, yet radiographic diagnosis remains a challenge. Diagnosis is complicated by the heterogeneity of radiographic features in both normal (e.g., complex anatomy, pregnancy) and pathologic states (e.g., primary endocrinopathy, hypophysitis). Clinical symptoms and laboratory testing are often equivocal, which can result in misdiagnosis or unnecessary specialist referrals. Computer vision models can aid in pituitary adenoma diagnosis; however, a major challenge to model development is the lack of dedicated pituitary imaging datasets. We hypothesized that deep machine learning-based volumetric segmentation models trained to extract the sellar and parasellar region from existing whole-brain MRI scans could be used to generate a novel dataset of pituitary imaging.

Methods: Six open-source whole-brain MRI datasets, created for research purposes, were included for model development. Deep learning-based volumetric segmentation models were trained using 318 manually annotated MRI scans from a single open-source MRI dataset. Out-of-distribution volumetric segmentation performance was then tested on 418 MRIs from five held-out research datasets.

Results: On our annotated images, the agreement between manual and model volumetric segmentations was high. Dice scores (a measure of overlap) ranged from 0.76 to 0.82 for both in-distribution and out-of-distribution model testing. In total, 6,755 MRIs from six data sources were included in the final generated pituitary dataset.

Conclusions: We present the first and largest dataset of pituitary imaging constructed using existing MRI data and deep volumetric segmentation models trained to identify sellar and parasellar anatomy. The model generalizes well across patient populations and MRI scanner types. We hope our pituitary dataset will be an integral part of future machine learning research on pituitary pathologies.

No conflict of interest has been declared by the author(s).

Publication History

Article published online:
01 February 2023