NESTED DILATION NETWORKS FOR BRAIN

TUMOUR SEGMENTATION BASED ON MAGNETIC

RESONANCE IMAGING

ABSTRACT:
Brain tumours are among the most fatal cancers worldwide.
Diagnosing and manually segmenting tumours are time-consuming
clinical tasks, and success strongly depends on the doctor’s
experience. Automatic quantitative analysis and accurate
segmentation of brain tumours are greatly needed for cancer
diagnosis. Brain tumours are usually imaged with different MRI
modalities, and these images are interpreted by image analysis
method. Different MRI modalities are employed for different
diagnosis tasks in clinical diagnosis and treatment. However, it is still
daunting task for clinicians to diagnose diseases with MRI, because
there is a wide variation in the size, shape, regularity, location and
heterogeneous appearance of brain tumours. Therefore, automatic
quantitative analysis and accurate segmentation of brain tumours
are greatly needed clinically to help doctors make accurate
diagnoses. MRI-based brain tumour segmentation is a task that still
requires extensive attention. This paper presents an advanced three-
dimensional multimodal segmentation algorithm called nested
dilation networks (NDNs). It is inspired by the U-Net architecture, a
convolutional neural network (CNN) developed for biomedical image
segmentation and is modified to achieve better performance for
brain tumour segmentation. We propose a CNN-based 3D
segmentation algorithm, the NDN, which can handle multimodal
images.
ADVANTAGES:

- By using this we can detect the brain tumour at the early

stages, which can increase the chances of patient’s
recovery after treatment.
- U-Net increases the number of up-sampling and skip
connections compared with Fully Convolutional Network
(FCN), which can supplement more location information
for semantic information.
- THE U-Net architecture has received increasing attention
recently and has been shown that it is a stable algorithm
for many segmentation tasks

LIMITATIONS:
However, U-Net still has limitations for some specialized
tasks.
 We found that stacking residual blocks instead of simple
convolution layers can improve the brain tumour
segmentation performance. This is because residual blocks
can fuse receptive fields of different sizes and ease the
training of the networks.
 This study is limited by the class imbalance problem, even
though some measures have been taken to alleviate it. Some
small regions in brain tumours like non-enhancing tumours
could not be predicted well.
 The class imbalance problem remains a challenge that
should be addressed in the future
 An extreme imbalance between categories affects the
segmentation results, especially for oedemas, and needs to
be addressed.
  Non-enhancing tumours usually have smaller regions than
the other two classes, which will have a negative effect on
the segmentation results.
APPLICATIONS:
 Clinical applications of computer aided systems have gained a
great deal of research attention.
 Supremely accurate brain tumour segmentation is a tedious
but vital task for clinicians because of various sizes and shapes
of tumours
 Compared with other state of state-of-the-art methods, NDNs
obtained higher dice similarity