Deep learning tools for the cancer clinic: an open-source framework with head and neck contour validation.

Background: With the rapid growth of deep learning research for medical applications comes the need for clinical personnel to be comfortable and familiar with these techniques. Taking a proven approach, we developed a straightforward open-source framework for producing automatic contours for head and neck planning computed tomography studies using a convolutional neural network (CNN).

Methods: Anonymized studies of 229 patients treated at our clinic for head and neck cancer from 2014 to 2018 were used to train and validate the network.