[joconne]

As a medical physicist in radiation oncology who looks at segmentations generated like these I think you are missing the application slightly. The application of these segmentations is not in diagnosis or intervention, they are used mostly by a treatment planning algorithm.

The radiation oncologist will outline the tumour and a few organs at risk manually. This segmentation algorithm would then steps in and outlines organs that the doctor would not have traditionally contoured. For a lung lesion the RO may contour the lesion and the heart but might not contour both lungs and the diaphragm.

We can then input these segmentations into a treatment planning optimization algorithm that sets the radiation beam angles and collimation to meet constraints that minimize organ dose and maximize tumour dose. So in effect the application of this sort of segmentation is to give more information to an optimizer.

Not that it doesn't have its problems! But I think it's important to note that the application is not diagnostic