MR Segmentator
An AI Tool for Detailed Body Segmentation, Making Medical Images More Accessible
The COMFORT research consortium has developed the MRSegmentator, an artificial intelligence tool that analyses medical images, particularly MRI scans, significantly improving cancer diagnosis and treatment.
Why is this important?
Medical images, while essential for diagnosis and treatment planning, contain vast amounts of complex information. To make these images truly useful, doctors and researchers need to accurately identify and outline (segment) different organs and structures within them. This segmentation is essential for many purposes: measuring organ volumes, tracking changes over time, planning treatments, and developing new AI-based diagnostic tools. While the automated analysis of CT scans is already quite advanced, extracting this detailed information from MRI scans has been particularly challenging.
The COMFORT team has addressed this challenge by developing the MRSegmentator, which can automatically identify and outline 40 different body structures in MRI scans with high accuracy.
This is particularly important for cancer research and treatment, where a precise understanding of organ boundaries and relationships is critical for both diagnosis and treatment planning.
By making this tool freely available to the medical community, COMFORT is opening possibilities of many new developments in healthcare. Researchers can use the tool to develop new biomarkers for disease detection, improve treatment planning systems, and create more sophisticated diagnostic AI tools. For physicians, it could mean more efficient workflows and more time to focus on patient care rather than manual image analysis.
Key Impact:
- Enables faster and more accurate analysis of medical images, supporting better cancer diagnosis and treatment
- Provides a foundation for developing new AI-based diagnostic tools
- Helps standardise how we measure and analyse organs in medical images
- Supports more precise treatment planning and monitoring of disease progression
This important output of the COMFORT project marks an important step toward more precise and personalised medicine, potentially improving how we diagnose and treat diseases like prostate and kidney cancer in the future.