BRACHIO: Broad Representations Across Centres for Head-and-neck Imaging Oncology (HECKTOR 2026)
Roxanne De Maeyer, Ine Dirks, Yannick Brackenier, Simon DeKeyser, Jef Vandemeulebroucke, Vicky De Ridder
Abstract
The HECKTOR 2026 challenge benchmarks machine learning for head and neck cancer, where teams delineate primary and nodal tumour volumes, perform TN staging, and predict recurrence-free survival (RFS). This report describes the submissions for the HECKTOR challenge of team nucli. As the three tasks span both dense and global information from multicentric PET/CT scans, we utilise self-supervised pre-trained encoders, training a 2D DINOv2 encoder (PET-DINOv2-MIPs) on HECKTOR 2026's PET scans. Our final test submission ensembles a DynUNet trained from scratch with a SwinUNETR whose Swin trunk was initialised from a SimMIM-pre-trained checkpoint for segmentation, reaching a mean Dice of 0.5409. For TN staging, GTVp/GTVn geometric features from the segmentation masks are fit to stage probabilities by logistic regression (LR) and fused with PET-DINOv2-MIPs deep features (PCA + LR) via a second-level LR, reaching balanced accuracies of 0.3962 (T-stage) and 0.6432 (N-stage). For the RFS prognosis task, we fine-tune the last two blocks of the PET-DINOv2-MIPs ViT-S encoder jointly with an MLP head under a CoxPH loss, concatenating clinical covariates with the imaging features, reaching a test Harrell's C-index of 0.6577 and a weighted challenge score of 0.5802. The prognosis result is comparable to the best entry of the previous edition and consistent with our internal cross-validation, while our segmentation result is well below it and limits the staging results that depend on it.