No Arabic abstract
Glioma is one of the most common and aggressive types of primary brain tumors. The accurate segmentation of subcortical brain structures is crucial to the study of gliomas in that it helps the monitoring of the progression of gliomas and aids the evaluation of treatment outcomes. However, the large amount of required human labor makes it difficult to obtain the manually segmented Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data, limiting the use of precise quantitative measurements in the clinical practice. In this work, we try to address this problem by developing a 3D Convolutional Neural Network~(3D CNN) based model to automatically segment gliomas. The major difficulty of our segmentation model comes with the fact that the location, structure, and shape of gliomas vary significantly among different patients. In order to accurately classify each voxel, our model captures multi-scale contextual information by extracting features from two scales of receptive fields. To fully exploit the tumor structure, we propose a novel architecture that hierarchically segments different lesion regions of the necrotic and non-enhancing tumor~(NCR/NET), peritumoral edema~(ED) and GD-enhancing tumor~(ET). Additionally, we utilize densely connected convolutional blocks to further boost the performance. We train our model with a patch-wise training schema to mitigate the class imbalance problem. The proposed method is validated on the BraTS 2017 dataset and it achieves Dice scores of 0.72, 0.83 and 0.81 for the complete tumor, tumor core and enhancing tumor, respectively. These results are comparable to the reported state-of-the-art results, and our method is better than existing 3D-based methods in terms of compactness, time and space efficiency.
Spinal cord tumors lead to neurological morbidity and mortality. Being able to obtain morphometric quantification (size, location, growth rate) of the tumor, edema, and cavity can result in improved monitoring and treatment planning. Such quantification requires the segmentation of these structures into three separate classes. However, manual segmentation of 3-dimensional structures is time-consuming and tedious, motivating the development of automated methods. Here, we tailor a model adapted to the spinal cord tumor segmentation task. Data were obtained from 343 patients using gadolinium-enhanced T1-weighted and T2-weighted MRI scans with cervical, thoracic, and/or lumbar coverage. The dataset includes the three most common intramedullary spinal cord tumor types: astrocytomas, ependymomas, and hemangioblastomas. The proposed approach is a cascaded architecture with U-Net-based models that segments tumors in a two-stage process: locate and label. The model first finds the spinal cord and generates bounding box coordinates. The images are cropped according to this output, leading to a reduced field of view, which mitigates class imbalance. The tumor is then segmented. The segmentation of the tumor, cavity, and edema (as a single class) reached 76.7 $pm$ 1.5% of Dice score and the segmentation of tumors alone reached 61.8 $pm$ 4.0% Dice score. The true positive detection rate was above 87% for tumor, edema, and cavity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fully automatic deep learning model for spinal cord tumor segmentation. The multiclass segmentation pipeline is available in the Spinal Cord Toolbox (https://spinalcordtoolbox.com/). It can be run with custom data on a regular computer within seconds.
Brain tumor segmentation plays an essential role in medical image analysis. In recent studies, deep convolution neural networks (DCNNs) are extremely powerful to tackle tumor segmentation tasks. We propose in this paper a novel training method that enhances the segmentation results by adding an additional classification branch to the network. The whole network was trained end-to-end on the Multimodal Brain Tumor Segmentation Challenge (BraTS) 2020 training dataset. On the BraTSs validation set, it achieved an average Dice score of 78.43%, 89.99%, and 84.22% respectively for the enhancing tumor, the whole tumor, and the tumor core.
Lung tumors, especially those located close to or surrounded by soft tissues like the mediastinum, are difficult to segment due to the low soft tissue contrast on computed tomography images. Magnetic resonance images contain superior soft-tissue contrast information that can be leveraged if both modalities were available for training. Therefore, we developed a cross-modality educed learning approach where MR information that is educed from CT is used to hallucinate MRI and improve CT segmentation. Our approach, called cross-modality educed deep learning segmentation (CMEDL) combines CT and pseudo MR produced from CT by aligning their features to obtain segmentation on CT. Features computed in the last two layers of parallelly trained CT and MR segmentation networks are aligned. We implemented this approach on U-net and dense fully convolutional networks (dense-FCN). Our networks were trained on unrelated cohorts from open-source the Cancer Imaging Archive CT images (N=377), an internal archive T2-weighted MR (N=81), and evaluated using separate validation (N=304) and testing (N=333) CT-delineated tumors. Our approach using both networks were significantly more accurate (U-net $P <0.001$; denseFCN $P <0.001$) than CT-only networks and achieved an accuracy (Dice similarity coefficient) of 0.71$pm$0.15 (U-net), 0.74$pm$0.12 (denseFCN) on validation and 0.72$pm$0.14 (U-net), 0.73$pm$0.12 (denseFCN) on the testing sets. Our novel approach demonstrated that educing cross-modality information through learned priors enhances CT segmentation performance
Background: Glioma is the most common brain malignant tumor, with a high morbidity rate and a mortality rate of more than three percent, which seriously endangers human health. The main method of acquiring brain tumors in the clinic is MRI. Segmentation of brain tumor regions from multi-modal MRI scan images is helpful for treatment inspection, post-diagnosis monitoring, and effect evaluation of patients. However, the common operation in clinical brain tumor segmentation is still manual segmentation, lead to its time-consuming and large performance difference between different operators, a consistent and accurate automatic segmentation method is urgently needed. Methods: To meet the above challenges, we propose an automatic brain tumor MRI data segmentation framework which is called AGSE-VNet. In our study, the Squeeze and Excite (SE) module is added to each encoder, the Attention Guide Filter (AG) module is added to each decoder, using the channel relationship to automatically enhance the useful information in the channel to suppress the useless information, and use the attention mechanism to guide the edge information and remove the influence of irrelevant information such as noise. Results: We used the BraTS2020 challenge online verification tool to evaluate our approach. The focus of verification is that the Dice scores of the whole tumor (WT), tumor core (TC) and enhanced tumor (ET) are 0.68, 0.85 and 0.70, respectively. Conclusion: Although MRI images have different intensities, AGSE-VNet is not affected by the size of the tumor, and can more accurately extract the features of the three regions, it has achieved impressive results and made outstanding contributions to the clinical diagnosis and treatment of brain tumor patients.
Automatic and accurate whole-heart and great vessel segmentation from 3D cardiac magnetic resonance (MR) images plays an important role in the computer-assisted diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease. However, this task is very challenging due to ambiguous cardiac borders and large anatomical variations among different subjects. In this paper, we propose a novel densely-connected volumetric convolutional neural network, referred as DenseVoxNet, to automatically segment the cardiac and vascular structures from 3D cardiac MR images. The DenseVoxNet adopts the 3D fully convolutional architecture for effective volume-to-volume prediction. From the learning perspective, our DenseVoxNet has three compelling advantages. First, it preserves the maximum information flow between layers by a densely-connected mechanism and hence eases the network training. Second, it avoids learning redundant feature maps by encouraging feature reuse and hence requires fewer parameters to achieve high performance, which is essential for medical applications with limited training data. Third, we add auxiliary side paths to strengthen the gradient propagation and stabilize the learning process. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DenseVoxNet by comparing it with the state-of-the-art approaches from HVSMR 2016 challenge in conjunction with MICCAI, and our network achieves the best dice coefficient. We also show that our network can achieve better performance than other 3D ConvNets but with fewer parameters.