Dataset Information

Automatic Brain Tumor Segmentation Based on Cascaded Convolutional Neural Networks With Uncertainty Estimation.

ABSTRACT: Automatic segmentation of brain tumors from medical images is important for clinical assessment and treatment planning of brain tumors. Recent years have seen an increasing use of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for this task, but most of them use either 2D networks with relatively low memory requirement while ignoring 3D context, or 3D networks exploiting 3D features while with large memory consumption. In addition, existing methods rarely provide uncertainty information associated with the segmentation result. We propose a cascade of CNNs to segment brain tumors with hierarchical subregions from multi-modal Magnetic Resonance images (MRI), and introduce a 2.5D network that is a trade-off between memory consumption, model complexity and receptive field. In addition, we employ test-time augmentation to achieve improved segmentation accuracy, which also provides voxel-wise and structure-wise uncertainty information of the segmentation result. Experiments with BraTS 2017 dataset showed that our cascaded framework with 2.5D CNNs was one of the top performing methods (second-rank) for the BraTS challenge. We also validated our method with BraTS 2018 dataset and found that test-time augmentation improves brain tumor segmentation accuracy and that the resulting uncertainty information can indicate potential mis-segmentations and help to improve segmentation accuracy.

SUBMITTER: Wang G

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6700294 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

Automatic Brain Tumor Segmentation Based on Cascaded Convolutional Neural Networks With Uncertainty Estimation.

Wang Guotai G Li Wenqi W Ourselin Sébastien S Vercauteren Tom T

Frontiers in computational neuroscience 20190813

Automatic segmentation of brain tumors from medical images is important for clinical assessment and treatment planning of brain tumors. Recent years have seen an increasing use of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for this task, but most of them use either 2D networks with relatively low memory requirement while ignoring 3D context, or 3D networks exploiting 3D features while with large memory consumption. In addition, existing methods rarely provide uncertainty information associated with th ...[more]

PMID: 31456678

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Project description:The spinal cord is frequently affected by atrophy and/or lesions in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients. Segmentation of the spinal cord and lesions from MRI data provides measures of damage, which are key criteria for the diagnosis, prognosis, and longitudinal monitoring in MS. Automating this operation eliminates inter-rater variability and increases the efficiency of large-throughput analysis pipelines. Robust and reliable segmentation across multi-site spinal cord data is challenging because of the large variability related to acquisition parameters and image artifacts. In particular, a precise delineation of lesions is hindered by a broad heterogeneity of lesion contrast, size, location, and shape. The goal of this study was to develop a fully-automatic framework - robust to variability in both image parameters and clinical condition - for segmentation of the spinal cord and intramedullary MS lesions from conventional MRI data of MS and non-MS cases. Scans of 1042 subjects (459 healthy controls, 471 MS patients, and 112 with other spinal pathologies) were included in this multi-site study (n = 30). Data spanned three contrasts (T1-, T2-, and T2∗-weighted) for a total of 1943 vol and featured large heterogeneity in terms of resolution, orientation, coverage, and clinical conditions. The proposed cord and lesion automatic segmentation approach is based on a sequence of two Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). To deal with the very small proportion of spinal cord and/or lesion voxels compared to the rest of the volume, a first CNN with 2D dilated convolutions detects the spinal cord centerline, followed by a second CNN with 3D convolutions that segments the spinal cord and/or lesions. CNNs were trained independently with the Dice loss. When compared against manual segmentation, our CNN-based approach showed a median Dice of 95% vs. 88% for PropSeg (p ≤ 0.05), a state-of-the-art spinal cord segmentation method. Regarding lesion segmentation on MS data, our framework provided a Dice of 60%, a relative volume difference of -15%, and a lesion-wise detection sensitivity and precision of 83% and 77%, respectively. In this study, we introduce a robust method to segment the spinal cord and intramedullary MS lesions on a variety of MRI contrasts. The proposed framework is open-source and readily available in the Spinal Cord Toolbox.

Dataset Information

Automatic Brain Tumor Segmentation Based on Cascaded Convolutional Neural Networks With Uncertainty Estimation.

Publications

Automatic Brain Tumor Segmentation Based on Cascaded Convolutional Neural Networks With Uncertainty Estimation.

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