Table 3.

Head and neck.

Publication	Year	Purpose	Image Modality	Patients	Ground Truth	Key Innovation	Outcome
Groendahl et al. (55)	2021	Tumors and involved nodes segmentation	PET/CT	197	Manual GTV delineation	Comparison of Traditional Methods with Machine Learning and Deep Learning Approaches	Dice = 0.75
Taku et al. (56)	2022	Involved LN segmentation	CT	110	Pathological Report	Use DL-CNN to segment GTVT for HPV-associated OPC	Dice = 0.92
Tekchandani et al. (57)	2022	LN segmentation and metastatic analysis	CT	175	Pathological Report	Introduced LNdtnNet: combines attention, residual UNet, squeeze-excitation for CT	Dice = 0.94
Wu et al. (58)	2022	Metastatic LN detection	CT	114	Pathologically Confirmed	Integrated lymph node features with GCN for top performance.	mFROC = 0.63
Bollen et al. (59)	2023	GTV segmentation	CT/PET/MRI	170	GTV delineation	Developed automated GTV delineation using 3D CNN with multimodal imaging	mDice = 0.89
Ariji et al. (60)	2022	Metastatic cervical LN segmentation	CT	158	Histopathological diagnosis	Utilize the U-Net architecture to segment metastatic cervical lymph nodes	F1 = 0.83
Liao et al. (61)	2025	Involved LN segmentation	CT	626	Manual segmentation	Used a two-stage transfer learning approach with nnUNet pretraining	Dice = 0.72
Al Hasan et al. (62)	2024	Small normal lymph nodes segmentation	CT	221	Manual segmentation	Enhanced Attentional U- Net by filtering encoder features for segmentation	Dice = 0.81