Introduction
Esophageal cancer, cancer, cancer deaths, esophageal cancer
ESOPHAGEAL CANCER, CANCER, OESOPHAGEAL CANCER
Esophageal cancer (EC) is the seventh most common cancer and sixth leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide in 2020, accounting for one in 18 cancer deaths (Currently, the main methods for automatic segmentation of esophageal cancer on CT images include the following: (1) Atlas-based method: by registering the normal atlas to the image to be segmented, the corresponding labels in the atlas are used to segment the lesion. This method is simple and easy to implement, but there are large registration errors and poor segmentation results (Dual-layer spectral-detector computed tomography (SDCT) can acquire temporal and spatial matched high- and low-energy photons from the same X-ray source, which also enables material decomposition in the projection domain. The anti-correlated noise suppression and iterative reconstruction algorithms are also applied, resulting in image noise reduction and image quality improvement (The main purpose of this study was to evaluate the performance of the 3D Res-UNet for fully automated segmentation of EC on SDCT scans acquired for radiotherapy treatment planning, and compare performance between CI and VMI