Dr. rer. nat. Fabian Isensee

Head of Engineering and Support Unit at DKFZ

During his PhD at the Division of Medical Image Computing of the German Cancer Research Center, Fabian Isensee has researched deep learning techniques for semantic segmentation of (three-dimensional) datasets in the biological and medical domain. He has been particularly active in the development of methods for automated segmentation pipeline design. His most prominent effort in that regard, nnU-Net, has become the de-facto standard for segmentation in the medical domain and was recently accepted for publication in Nature Methods. Throughout his PhD, Fabian Isensee has consistently enabled the translation of state-of-the-art algorithms into real-world applications. He is furthermore adamant about making his research publicly available. The methods he developed have won multiple international segmentation competitions.

Since 2020, Fabian Isensee is heading the HI Support Unit ‘Applied Computer Vision Lab’ at the DKFZ with the goal of translating state-of-the-art AI methods to the many diverse research applications found across the Helmholtz association. The support unit is working in close collaboration with Helmholtz researchers, provides consulting, develops domain agnostic state-of-the art software for AI-based image analysis and provides solutions for algorithm and competition evaluation.

Publications

Reinke, A., Tizabi, M. D., Baumgartner, M., Eisenmann, M., Heckmann-Nötzel, D., Kavur, A. E., Rädsch, T., Sudre, C. H., Acion, L., Antonelli, M., Arbel, T., Bakas, S., Benis, A., Buettner, F., Cardoso, M. J., Cheplygina, V., Chen, J., Christodoulou, E., Cimini, B. A., … Maier-Hein, L. (2024). Understanding metric-related pitfalls in image analysis validation. Nature Methods, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-023-02150-0

Yang, K., Musio, F., Ma, Y., Juchler, N., Paetzold, J. C., Al-Maskari, R., Höher, L., Li, H. B., Hamamci, I. E., Sekuboyina, A., Shit, S., Huang, H., Waldmannstetter, D., Kofler, F., Navarro, F., Menten, M., Ezhov, I., Rueckert, D., Vos, I., … Menze, B. (2024). TopCoW: Benchmarking Topology-Aware Anatomical Segmentation of the Circle of Willis (CoW) for CTA and MRA (arXiv:2312.17670). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2312.17670

Lamm, L., Zufferey, S., Righetto, R. D., Wietrzynski, W., Yamauchi, K. A., Burt, A., Liu, Y., Zhang, H., Martinez-Sanchez, A., Ziegler, S., Isensee, F., Schnabel, J. A., Engel, B. D., & Peng, T. (2024). MemBrain v2: an end-to-end tool for the analysis of membranes in cryo-electron tomography. bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.01.05.574336

Gotkowski, K., Gupta, S., Godinho, J. R. A., Tochtrop, C. G. S., Maier-Hein, K. H., & Isensee, F. (2024). ParticleSeg3D: A scalable out-of-the-box deep learning segmentation solution for individual particle characterization from micro CT images in mineral processing and recycling. Powder Technology, 434, 119286. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.powtec.2023.119286

Koehler, G., Wald, T., Ulrich, C., Zimmerer, D., Jaeger, P. F., Franke, J. K., Kohl, S., Isensee, F., & Maier-Hein, K. H. (2024). RecycleNet: Latent Feature Recycling Leads to Iterative Decision Refinement. Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, 810–818. https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/WACV2024/html/Kohler_RecycleNet_Latent_Feature_Recycling_Leads_to_Iterative_Decision_Refinement_WACV_2024_paper.html

Isensee, F., & Maier-Hein, K. H. (2023). Look Ma, no code: fine tuning nnU-Net for the AutoPET II challenge by only adjusting its JSON plans (arXiv:2309.13747). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2309.13747

Kofler, F., Möller, H., Buchner, J. A., de la Rosa, E., Ezhov, I., Rosier, M., Mekki, I., Shit, S., Negwer, M., Al-Maskari, R., Ertürk, A., Vinayahalingam, S., Isensee, F., Pati, S., Rueckert, D., Kirschke, J. S., Ehrlich, S. K., Reinke, A., Menze, B., … Piraud, M. (2023). Panoptica -- instance-wise evaluation of 3D semantic and instance segmentation maps (arXiv:2312.02608). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2312.02608

Kovacs, B., Netzer, N., Baumgartner, M., Schrader, A., Isensee, F., Weißer, C., Wolf, I., Görtz, M., Jaeger, P. F., Schütz, V., Floca, R., Gnirs, R., Stenzinger, A., Hohenfellner, M., Schlemmer, H.-P., Bonekamp, D., & Maier-Hein, K. H. (2023). Addressing image misalignments in multi-parametric prostate MRI for enhanced computer-aided diagnosis of prostate cancer. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 19805. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-46747-z

Klein, L., Ziegler, S., Laufer, F., Debus, C., Götz, M., Maier‐Hein, K., Paetzold, U. W., Isensee, F., & Jäger, P. F. (2023). Discovering Process Dynamics for Scalable Perovskite Solar Cell Manufacturing with Explainable AI. Advanced Materials, 2307160. https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202307160

Abdallah, N., Wood, A., Benidir, T., Heller, N., Isensee, F., Tejpaul, R., Corrigan, D., Suk-Ouichai, C., Struyk, G., Moore, K., Venkatesh, N., Ergun, O., You, A., Campbell, R., Remer, E. M., Haywood, S., Krishnamurthi, V., Abouassaly, R., Campbell, S., … Weight, C. J. (2023). AI-generated R.E.N.A.L.+ Score Surpasses Human-generated Score in Predicting Renal Oncologic Outcomes. Urology, 180, 160–167. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.urology.2023.07.017

Kovacs, B., Netzer, N., Baumgartner, M., Eith, C., Bounias, D., Meinzer, C., Jaeger, P. F., Zhang, K. S., Floca, R., Schrader, A., Isensee, F., Gnirs, R., Goertz, M., Schuetz, V., Stenzinger, A., Hohenfellner, M., Schlemmer, H.-P., Wolf, I., Bonekamp, D., & Maier-Hein, K. H. (2023). Anatomy-informed Data Augmentation for Enhanced Prostate Cancer Detection (arXiv:2309.03652). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2309.03652

Gutsche, R., Lowis, C., Ziemons, K., Kocher, M., Ceccon, G., Brambilla, C. R., Shah, N. J., Langen, K.-J., Galldiks, N., Isensee, F., & Lohmann, P. (2023). Automated Brain Tumor Detection and Segmentation for Treatment Response Assessment Using Amino Acid PET. Journal of Nuclear Medicine: Official Publication, Society of Nuclear Medicine, jnumed.123.265725. https://doi.org/10.2967/jnumed.123.265725

Wald, T., Ulrich, C., Isensee, F., Zimmerer, D., Koehler, G., Baumgartner, M., & Maier-Hein, K. H. (2023). Exploring new ways: Enforcing representational dissimilarity to learn new features and reduce error consistency (arXiv:2307.02516). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2307.02516

Heller, N., Isensee, F., Trofimova, D., Tejpaul, R., Zhao, Z., Chen, H., Wang, L., Golts, A., Khapun, D., Shats, D., Shoshan, Y., Gilboa-Solomon, F., George, Y., Yang, X., Zhang, J., Zhang, J., Xia, Y., Wu, M., Liu, Z., … Weight, C. (2023). The KiTS21 Challenge: Automatic segmentation of kidneys, renal tumors, and renal cysts in corticomedullary-phase CT (arXiv:2307.01984). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2307.01984

Yang, L., Liu, Q., Kumar, P., Sengupta, A., Farnoud, A., Shen, R., Trofimova, D., Ziegler, S., Kutschke, D., Kreyling, W., Piraud, M., Isensee, F., Burgstaller, G., Rehberg, M., Stöger, T., & Schmid, O. (2023). 60 Multimodal Imaging and Artificial Intelligence Unveil Hot-Spot Deposition, Bronchial/Alveolar Dose and Cellular Fate of Biopersistent Nanoparticles in the Lung. Annals of Work Exposures and Health, 67, i53–i53. https://doi.org/10.1093/annweh/wxac087.129

Roy, S., Koehler, G., Baumgartner, M., Ulrich, C., Petersen, J., Isensee, F., & Maier-Hein, K. (2023). Transformer Utilization in Medical Image Segmentation Networks (arXiv:2304.04225). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2304.04225

Eisenmann, M., Reinke, A., Weru, V., Tizabi, M. D., Isensee, F., Adler, T. J., Ali, S., Andrearczyk, V., Aubreville, M., Baid, U., Bakas, S., Balu, N., Bano, S., Bernal, J., Bodenstedt, S., Casella, A., Cheplygina, V., Daum, M., de Bruijne, M., … Maier-Hein, L. (2023). Why is the winner the best? (arXiv:2303.17719). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.17719

Vollmuth, P., Foltyn, M., Huang, R. Y., Galldiks, N., Petersen, J., Isensee, F., van den Bent, M. J., Barkhof, F., Park, J. E., Park, Y. W., Ahn, S. S., Brugnara, G., Meredig, H., Jain, R., Smits, M., Pope, W. B., Maier-Hein, K., Weller, M., Wen, P. Y., … Bendszus, M. (2023). Artificial intelligence (AI)-based decision support improves reproducibility of tumor response assessment in neuro-oncology: An international multi-reader study. Neuro-Oncology, 25(3), 533–543. https://doi.org/10.1093/neuonc/noac189

Roß, T., Bruno, P., Reinke, A., Wiesenfarth, M., Koeppel, L., Full, P. M., Pekdemir, B., Godau, P., Trofimova, D., Isensee, F., Adler, T. J., Tran, T. N., Moccia, S., Calimeri, F., Müller-Stich, B. P., Kopp-Schneider, A., & Maier-Hein, L. (2023). Beyond rankings: Learning (more) from algorithm validation. Medical Image Analysis, 102765. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.media.2023.102765

Wood, A., Benidir, T., Abdallah, N., Heller, N., Isensee, F., Tejpaul, R., Suk-ouichai, C., Curry, C., You, A., Remer, E. M., Haywood, S., Campbell, S., Papanikolopoulos, N., & Weight, C. J. (2023). Predictive accuracy of computer-generated C-index nephrometry scores compared with human-generated scores in predicting oncologic and perioperative outcomes. Journal of Clinical Oncology, 41(6_suppl), 623–623. https://doi.org/10.1200/JCO.2023.41.6_suppl.623

Bilic, P., Christ, P., Li, H. B., Vorontsov, E., Ben-Cohen, A., Kaissis, G., Szeskin, A., Jacobs, C., Mamani, G. E. H., Chartrand, G., Lohöfer, F., Holch, J. W., Sommer, W., Hofmann, F., Hostettler, A., Lev-Cohain, N., Drozdzal, M., Amitai, M. M., Vivanti, R., … Menze, B. (2023). The Liver Tumor Segmentation Benchmark (LiTS). Medical Image Analysis, 84, 102680. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.media.2022.102680

Lüth, C. T., Zimmerer, D., Koehler, G., Jaeger, P. F., Isensee, F., Petersen, J., & Maier-Hein, K. H. (2023). CRADL: Contrastive Representations for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection and Localization (arXiv:2301.02126). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2301.02126

Maška, M., Ulman, V., Delgado-Rodriguez, P., Gómez-de-Mariscal, E., Nečasová, T., Guerrero Peña, F. A., Ren, T. I., Meyerowitz, E. M., Scherr, T., Löffler, K., Mikut, R., Guo, T., Wang, Y., Allebach, J. P., Bao, R., Al-Shakarji, N. M., Rahmon, G., Toubal, I. E., Palaniappan, K., … Ortiz-de-Solórzano, C. (2023). The Cell Tracking Challenge: 10 years of objective benchmarking. Nature Methods, 20(7), 1010–1020. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-023-01879-y

Isensee, F., Ulrich, C., Wald, T., & Maier-Hein, K. H. (2023). Extending nnU-Net Is All You Need. In T. M. Deserno, H. Handels, A. Maier, K. Maier-Hein, C. Palm, & T. Tolxdorff (Eds.), Bildverarbeitung für die Medizin 2023 (pp. 12–17). Springer Fachmedien. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-41657-7_7

Klein, L., Ziegler, S., Laufer, F., Debus, C., Götz, M., Maier-Hein, K., Paetzold, U., Isensee, F., & Jaeger, P. (2023). Understanding Scalable Perovskite Solar Cell Manufacturing with Explainable AI. https://publikationen.bibliothek.kit.edu/1000167169

Yang, L., Kumar, P., Sengupta, A., Farnoud, A., Shen, R., Trofimova, D., Ziegler, S., Davoudi, N., Doryab, A., Yildirim, A., Schiller, H., Razansky, D., Piraud, M., Liu, Q., Rehberg, M., Stoeger, T., Burgstaller, G., Kreyling, W., Isensee, F., & Schmid, O. (2023). Multimodal imaging and deep learning unveil pulmonary delivery profiles and acinar migration of tissue-resident macrophages in the lun. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-2994336/v1

Ulrich, C., Isensee, F., Wald, T., Zenk, M., Baumgartner, M., & Maier-Hein, K. H. (2023). MultiTalent: A Multi-dataset Approach to Medical Image Segmentation. In H. Greenspan, A. Madabhushi, P. Mousavi, S. Salcudean, J. Duncan, T. Syeda-Mahmood, & R. Taylor (Eds.), Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2023 (pp. 648–658). Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43898-1_62

Roy, S., Koehler, G., Ulrich, C., Baumgartner, M., Petersen, J., Isensee, F., Jaeger, P. F., & Maier-Hein, K. (2023). MedNeXt: Transformer-driven Scaling of ConvNets for Medical Image Segmentation. https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2303.09975

Eisenmann, M., Reinke, A., Weru, V., Tizabi, M. D., Isensee, F., Adler, T. J., Godau, P., Cheplygina, V., Kozubek, M., Ali, S., Gupta, A., Kybic, J., Noble, A., de Solórzano, C. O., Pachade, S., Petitjean, C., Sage, D., Wei, D., Wilden, E., … Maier-Hein, L. (2022). Biomedical image analysis competitions: The state of current participation practice (arXiv:2212.08568). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2212.08568

Roth, H. R., Xu, Z., Tor-Díez, C., Sanchez Jacob, R., Zember, J., Molto, J., Li, W., Xu, S., Turkbey, B., Turkbey, E., Yang, D., Harouni, A., Rieke, N., Hu, S., Isensee, F., Tang, C., Yu, Q., Sölter, J., Zheng, T., … Linguraru, M. G. (2022). Rapid artificial intelligence solutions in a pandemic—The COVID-19-20 Lung CT Lesion Segmentation Challenge. Medical Image Analysis, 82, 102605. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.media.2022.102605

Ostmeier, S., Axelrod, B., Bertels, J., Isensee, F., Lansberg, M. G., Christensen, S., Albers, G. W., Li, L.-J., & Heit, J. J. (2022). USE-Evaluator: Performance Metrics for Medical Image Segmentation Models with Uncertain, Small or Empty Reference Annotations (arXiv:2209.13008). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2209.13008

Zimmerer, D., Full, P. M., Isensee, F., Jäger, P., Adler, T., Petersen, J., Köhler, G., Ross, T., Reinke, A., Kascenas, A., Jensen, B. S., O’Neil, A. Q., Tan, J., Hou, B., Batten, J., Qiu, H., Kainz, B., Shvetsova, N., Fedulova, I., … Maier-Hein, K. (2022). MOOD 2020: A Public Benchmark for Out-of-Distribution Detection and Localization on Medical Images. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 41(10), 2728–2738. https://doi.org/10.1109/TMI.2022.3170077

Maier-Hein, L., Reinke, A., Godau, P., Tizabi, M. D., Christodoulou, E., Glocker, B., Isensee, F., Kleesiek, J., Kozubek, M., Reyes, M., Riegler, M. A., Wiesenfarth, M., Baumgartner, M., Eisenmann, M., Heckmann-Nötzel, D., Kavur, A. E., Rädsch, T., Acion, L., Antonelli, M., … Jäger, P. F. (2022). Metrics reloaded: Pitfalls and recommendations for image analysis validation (arXiv:2206.01653). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2206.01653

Koehler, G., Isensee, F., & Maier-Hein, K. (2022). A Noisy nnU-Net Student for Semi-supervised Abdominal Organ Segmentation. https://openreview.net/forum?id=-XzpY3MyKPU

Yang, L., Liu, Q., Kumar, P., Sengupta, A., Farnoud, A., Shen, R., Trofimova, D., Kutschke, D., Piraud, M., Isensee, F., Burgstaller, G., Rehberg, M., Stoeger, T., & Schmid, O. (2022). Multimodal 4D imaging and deep learning unveil acinar migration of tissue-resident, nanoparticle-laden macrophages in the lung. European Respiratory Journal, 60(suppl 66). https://doi.org/10.1183/13993003.congress-2022.407

Isensee, F., Ulrich, C., Wald, T., & Maier-Hein, K. H. (2022). Extending nnU-Net is all you need (arXiv:2208.10791). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2208.10791

Vollmuth, P., Foltyn, M., Huang, R. Y., Galldiks, N., Petersen, J., Isensee, F., van den Bent, M. J., Barkhof, F., Park, J. E., Park, Y. W., Ahn, S. S., Brugnara, G., Meredig, H., Jain, R., Smits, M., Pope, W. B., Maier-Hein, K., Weller, M., Wen, P. Y., … Bendszus, M. (2022). AI-based decision support improves reproducibility of tumor response assessment in neuro-oncology: an international multi-reader study. Neuro-Oncology, noac189. https://doi.org/10.1093/neuonc/noac189

Antonelli, M., Reinke, A., Bakas, S., Farahani, K., Kopp-Schneider, A., Landman, B. A., Litjens, G., Menze, B., Ronneberger, O., Summers, R. M., van Ginneken, B., Bilello, M., Bilic, P., Christ, P. F., Do, R. K. G., Gollub, M. J., Heckers, S. H., Huisman, H., Jarnagin, W. R., … Cardoso, M. J. (2022). The Medical Segmentation Decathlon. Nature Communications, 13(1), 4128. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-30695-9

Reinke, A., Tizabi, M. D., Sudre, C. H., Eisenmann, M., Rädsch, T., Baumgartner, M., Acion, L., Antonelli, M., Arbel, T., Bakas, S., Bankhead, P., Benis, A., Cardoso, M. J., Cheplygina, V., Christodoulou, E., Cimini, B., Collins, G. S., Farahani, K., van Ginneken, B., … Maier-Hein, L. (2022). Common Limitations of Image Processing Metrics: A Picture Story (arXiv:2104.05642). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2104.05642

Assalauova, D., Ignatenko, A., Isensee, F., Trofimova, D., & Vartanyants, I. A. (2022). Classification of diffraction patterns using a convolutional neural network in single-particle-imaging experiments performed at X-ray free-electron lasers. Journal of Applied Crystallography, 55(3), 444–454. https://doi.org/10.1107/S1600576722002667

Schellenberg, M., Dreher, K. K., Holzwarth, N., Isensee, F., Reinke, A., Schreck, N., Seitel, A., Tizabi, M. D., Maier-Hein, L., & Gröhl, J. (2022). Semantic segmentation of multispectral photoacoustic images using deep learning. Photoacoustics, 26, 100341. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pacs.2022.100341

Yang, L., Shen, R., Trofimova, D., Stöger, T., Piraud, M., Isensee, F., & Schmid, O. (2022). Deep learning in pulmonary drug delivery. ERJ Open Research, 8(suppl 8). https://doi.org/10.1183/23120541.LSC-2022.190

Pflüger, I., Wald, T., Isensee, F., Schell, M., Meredig, H., Schlamp, K., Bernhardt, D., Brugnara, G., Heußel, C. P., Debus, J., Wick, W., Bendszus, M., Maier-Hein, K. H., & Vollmuth, P. (2022). Automated detection and quantification of brain metastases on clinical MRI data using artificial neural networks. Neuro-Oncology Advances, 4(1), vdac138. https://doi.org/10.1093/noajnl/vdac138

Roß, T., Reinke, A., Full, P. M., Wagner, M., Kenngott, H., Apitz, M., Hempe, H., Mindroc-Filimon, D., Scholz, P., Tran, T. N., Bruno, P., Arbeláez, P., Bian, G.-B., Bodenstedt, S., Bolmgren, J. L., Bravo-Sánchez, L., Chen, H.-B., González, C., Guo, D., … Maier-Hein, L. (2021). Comparative validation of multi-instance instrument segmentation in endoscopy: Results of the ROBUST-MIS 2019 challenge. Medical Image Analysis, 70, 101920. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.media.2020.101920

Isensee, F., Jaeger, P. F., Kohl, S. A. A., Petersen, J., & Maier-Hein, K. H. (2021). nnU-Net: a self-configuring method for deep learning-based biomedical image segmentation. Nature Methods, 18(2), 203–211. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-020-01008-z

Baumgartner, M., Jäger, P. F., Isensee, F., & Maier-Hein, K. H. (2021). nnDetection: A Self-configuring Method for Medical Object Detection. In M. de Bruijne, P. C. Cattin, S. Cotin, N. Padoy, S. Speidel, Y. Zheng, & C. Essert (Eds.), Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2021 (pp. 530–539). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87240-3_51

Schell, M., Pflüger, I., Brugnara, G., Isensee, F., Neuberger, U., Foltyn, M., Kessler, T., Sahm, F., Wick, A., Nowosielski, M., Heiland, S., Weller, M., Platten, M., Maier-Hein, K. H., Von Deimling, A., Van Den Bent, M. J., Gorlia, T., Wick, W., Bendszus, M., & Kickingereder, P. (2020). Validation of diffusion MRI phenotypes for predicting response to bevacizumab in recurrent glioblastoma: post-hoc analysis of the EORTC-26101 trial. Neuro-Oncology, 22(11), 1667–1676. https://doi.org/10.1093/neuonc/noaa120

Full, P. M., Isensee, F., Jäger, P. F., & Maier-Hein, K. (2020). Studying Robustness of Semantic Segmentation under Domain Shift in cardiac MRI (arXiv:2011.07592). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2011.07592

Isensee, F., Jaeger, P. F., Full, P. M., Vollmuth, P., & Maier-Hein, K. H. (2020). nnU-Net for Brain Tumor Segmentation (arXiv:2011.00848). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2011.00848

Kickingereder, P., Brugnara, G., Hansen, M. B., Nowosielski, M., Pflüger, I., Schell, M., Isensee, F., Foltyn, M., Neuberger, U., Kessler, T., Sahm, F., Wick, A., Heiland, S., Weller, M., Platten, M., von Deimling, A., Maier-Hein, K. H., Østergaard, L., van den Bent, M. J., … Bendszus, M. (2020). Noninvasive Characterization of Tumor Angiogenesis and Oxygenation in Bevacizumab-treated Recurrent Glioblastoma by Using Dynamic Susceptibility MRI: Secondary Analysis of the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer 26101 Trial. Radiology, 297(1), 164–175. https://doi.org/10.1148/radiol.2020200978