Purpose: To determine if pelvic/ovarian and omental lesions of ovarian cancer can be reliably segmented on computed tomography (CT) using fully automated deep learning-based methods.

Methods: A deep learning model for the two most common disease sites of high-grade serous ovarian cancer lesions (pelvis/ovaries and omentum) was developed and compared against the well-established “no-new-Net” framework and unrevised trainee radiologist segmentations. A total of 451 CT scans collected from four different institutions were used for training (n = 276), evaluation (n = 104) and testing (n = 71) of the methods. The performance was evaluated using the Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and compared using a Wilcoxon test.

Results: Our model outperformed no-new-Net for the pelvic/ovarian lesions in cross-validation, on the evaluation and test set by a significant margin (p values being 4 × 10–7, 3 × 10–4, 4 × 10–2, respectively), and for the omental lesions on the evaluation set (p = 1 × 10–3). Our model did not perform significantly differently in segmenting pelvic/ovarian lesions (p = 0.371) compared to a trainee radiologist. On an independent test set, the model achieved a DSC performance of 71 ± 20 (mean ± standard deviation) for pelvic/ovarian and 61 ± 24 for omental lesions.

Conclusion: Automated ovarian cancer segmentation on CT scans using deep neural networks is feasible and achieves performance close to a trainee-level radiologist for pelvic/ovarian lesions.

Relevance statement: Automated segmentation of ovarian cancer may be used by clinicians for CT-based volumetric assessments and researchers for building complex analysis pipelines.

Key points:

• The first automated approach for pelvic/ovarian and omental ovarian cancer lesion segmentation on CT images has been presented.
• Automated segmentation of ovarian cancer lesions can be comparable with manual segmentation of trainee radiologists.
• Careful hyperparameter tuning can provide models significantly outperforming strong state-of-the-art baselines. Graphical Abstract: [Figure not available: see fulltext.]