A patient with upper thoracic EC showing constricted portion (lower) and non-constricted portion (upper).
EC lesion
(A) VMI40kev, (B) CI. Spot film of the barium-swallow study (C) and endoscopic image (D) indicated the upper affected but non-constricted portion of EC. Image B shows missed segmentation of the non-constricted upper portion on CI.Besides its retrospective design, this study had some limitations. First, it had a single-center design and used a single CT scanner. As only data from our institution were applied, generalization to other scanners and sites requires the testing of the generalizability of our automatic segmentation model. Secondly, the sample size of this study was limited. A network is affected by the sample size, and the generalization ability of the model has not been fully verified. Some cases with poor segmentation were found in EC; because of the limited cases included in the current study, more cases are needed to improve the accuracy of automatic segmentation in these cases. In the future, we plan to apply our model to datasets obtained with various CT scanners in various institutions. Thirdly, metastatic lymph node was also required to delineate along with EC lesion for radiotherapy treatment planning. While our primary study only focused on the EC lesion segmentation.