Lo Kwee-Seong Medical Image Analysis Laboratory, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong.
Lo Kwee-Seong Medical Image Analysis Laboratory, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong.
Med Image Anal. 2022 Jan;75:102259. doi: 10.1016/j.media.2021.102259. Epub 2021 Oct 13.
In this paper, we present a Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for fully automatic brain tumor segmentation for both high- and low-grade gliomas in MRI images. Unlike normal tissues or organs that usually have a fixed location or shape, brain tumors with different grades have shown great variation in terms of the location, size, structure, and morphological appearance. Moreover, the severe data imbalance exists not only between the brain tumor and non-tumor tissues, but also among the different sub-regions inside brain tumor (e.g., enhancing tumor, necrotic, edema, and non-enhancing tumor). Therefore, we introduce a hybrid model to address the challenges in the multi-modality multi-class brain tumor segmentation task. First, we propose the dynamic focal Dice loss function that is able to focus more on the smaller tumor sub-regions with more complex structures during training, and the learning capacity of the model is dynamically distributed to each class independently based on its training performance in different training stages. Besides, to better recognize the overall structure of the brain tumor and the morphological relationship among different tumor sub-regions, we relax the boundary constraints for the inner tumor regions in coarse-to-fine fashion. Additionally, a symmetric attention branch is proposed to highlight the possible location of the brain tumor from the asymmetric features caused by growth and expansion of the abnormal tissues in the brain. Generally, to balance the learning capacity of the model between spatial details and high-level morphological features, the proposed model relaxes the constraints of the inner boundary and complex details and enforces more attention on the tumor shape, location, and the harder classes of the tumor sub-regions. The proposed model is validated on the publicly available brain tumor dataset from real patients, BRATS 2019. The experimental results reveal that our model improves the overall segmentation performance in comparison with the state-of-the-art methods, with major progress on the recognition of the tumor shape, the structural relationship of tumor sub-regions, and the segmentation of more challenging tumor sub-regions, e.g., the tumor core, and enhancing tumor.
在本文中,我们提出了一种用于 MRI 图像中高级和低级脑肿瘤全自动分割的深度卷积神经网络(CNN)。与通常具有固定位置或形状的正常组织或器官不同,不同等级的脑肿瘤在位置、大小、结构和形态外观方面表现出很大的变化。此外,不仅在脑肿瘤与非肿瘤组织之间,而且在脑肿瘤内部的不同亚区(例如,增强肿瘤、坏死、水肿和非增强肿瘤)之间都存在严重的数据不平衡。因此,我们引入了一种混合模型来解决多模态多类脑肿瘤分割任务中的挑战。首先,我们提出了动态焦点 Dice 损失函数,该函数能够在训练过程中更专注于具有更复杂结构的较小肿瘤亚区,并且根据其在不同训练阶段的训练性能,模型的学习能力可以动态分配给每个类。此外,为了更好地识别脑肿瘤的整体结构和不同肿瘤亚区之间的形态关系,我们以粗到精的方式放宽了对内部肿瘤区域的边界约束。此外,还提出了一种对称注意分支,从大脑中异常组织生长和扩张引起的不对称特征中突出脑肿瘤的可能位置。通常,为了在模型的空间细节和高级形态特征之间平衡学习能力,所提出的模型放宽了内部边界和复杂细节的约束,并更多地关注肿瘤形状、位置和肿瘤亚区的更具挑战性的类别。所提出的模型在真实患者的公共脑肿瘤数据集 BRATS 2019 上进行了验证。实验结果表明,与最先进的方法相比,我们的模型提高了整体分割性能,在识别肿瘤形状、肿瘤亚区的结构关系以及分割更具挑战性的肿瘤亚区(例如肿瘤核心和增强肿瘤)方面取得了重大进展。