Children Are Not Small Adults: Addressing Limited Generalizability of an Adult Deep Learning CT Organ Segmentation Model to the Pediatric Population.

Deep learning (DL) tools developed on adult data sets may not generalize well to pediatric patients, posing potential safety risks. We evaluated the performance of TotalSegmentator, a state-of-the-art adult-trained CT organ segmentation model, on a subset of organs in a pediatric CT dataset and explored optimization strategies to improve pediatric segmentation performance. TotalSegmentator was retrospectively evaluated on abdominal CT scans from an external adult dataset (n = 300) and an external pediatric data set (n = 359).