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The purpose was to assess the clinical value of a novel DropOut model for detecting and segmenting brain metastases, in which a neural network is trained on four distinct MRI sequences using an input dropout layer, thus simulating the scenario of missing MRI data by training on the full set and all possible subsets of the input data. This retrospective, multi-center study, evaluated 165 patients with brain metastases. A deep learning based segmentation model for automatic segmentation of brain metastases, named DropOut, was trained on multi-sequence MRI from 100 patients, and validated/tested on 10/55 patients. The segmentation results were compared with the performance of a state-of-the-art DeepLabV3 model. The MR sequences in the training set included pre- and post-gadolinium (Gd) T1-weighted 3D fast spin echo, post-Gd T1-weighted inversion recovery (IR) prepped fast spoiled gradient echo, and 3D fluid attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR), whereas the test set did not include the IR prepped image-series. The ground truth were established by experienced neuroradiologists. The results were evaluated using precision, recall, Dice score, and receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve statistics, while the Wilcoxon rank sum test was used to compare the performance of the two neural networks. The area under the ROC curve (AUC), averaged across all test cases, was 0.989+-0.029 for the DropOut model and 0.989+-0.023 for the DeepLabV3 model (p=0.62). The DropOut model showed a significantly higher Dice score compared to the DeepLabV3 model (0.795+-0.105 vs. 0.774+-0.104, p=0.017), and a significantly lower average false positive rate of 3.6/patient vs. 7.0/patient (p<0.001) using a 10mm3 lesion-size limit. The DropOut model may facilitate accurate detection and segmentation of brain metastases on a multi-center basis, even when the test cohort is missing MRI input data.
Detecting and segmenting brain metastases is a tedious and time-consuming task for many radiologists, particularly with the growing use of multi-sequence 3D imaging. This study demonstrates automated detection and segmentation of brain metastases on multi-sequence MRI using a deep learning approach based on a fully convolution neural network (CNN). In this retrospective study, a total of 156 patients with brain metastases from several primary cancers were included. Pre-therapy MR images (1.5T and 3T) included pre- and post-gadolinium T1-weighted 3D fast spin echo, post-gadolinium T1-weighted 3D axial IR-prepped FSPGR, and 3D fluid attenuated inversion recovery. The ground truth was established by manual delineation by two experienced neuroradiologists. CNN training/development was performed using 100 and 5 patients, respectively, with a 2.5D network based on a GoogLeNet architecture. The results were evaluated in 51 patients, equally separated into those with few (1-3), multiple (4-10), and many (>10) lesions. Network performance was evaluated using precision, recall, Dice/F1 score, and ROC-curve statistics. For an optimal probability threshold, detection and segmentation performance was assessed on a per metastasis basis. The area under the ROC-curve (AUC), averaged across all patients, was 0.98. The AUC in the subgroups was 0.99, 0.97, and 0.97 for patients having 1-3, 4-10, and >10 metastases, respectively. Using an average optimal probability threshold determined by the development set, precision, recall, and Dice-score were 0.79, 0.53, and 0.79, respectively. At the same probability threshold, the network showed an average false positive rate of 8.3/patient (no lesion-size limit) and 3.4/patient (10 mm3 lesion size limit). In conclusion, a deep learning approach using multi-sequence MRI can aid in the detection and segmentation of brain metastases.
In fetal Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Super Resolution Reconstruction (SRR) algorithms are becoming popular tools to obtain high-resolution 3D volume reconstructions from low-resolution stacks of 2D slices, acquired at different orientations. To be effective, these algorithms often require accurate segmentation of the region of interest, such as the fetal brain in suspected pathological cases. In the case of Spina Bifida, Ebner, Wang et al. (NeuroImage, 2020) combined their SRR algorithm with a 2-step segmentation pipeline (2D localisation followed by a 2D segmentation network). However, if the localisation step fails, the second network is not able to recover a correct brain mask, thus requiring manual corrections for an effective SRR. In this work, we aim at improving the fetal brain segmentation for SRR in Spina Bifida. We hypothesise that a well-trained single-step UNet can achieve accurate performance, avoiding the need of a 2-step approach. We propose a new tool for fetal brain segmentation called MONAIfbs, which takes advantage of the Medical Open Network for Artificial Intelligence (MONAI) framework. Our network is based on the dynamic UNet (dynUNet), an adaptation of the nnU-Net framework. When compared to the original 2-step approach proposed in Ebner-Wang, and the same Ebner-Wang approach retrained with the expanded dataset available for this work, the dynUNet showed to achieve higher performance using a single step only. It also showed to reduce the number of outliers, as only 28 stacks obtained Dice score less than 0.9, compared to 68 for Ebner-Wang and 53 Ebner-Wang expanded. The proposed dynUNet model thus provides an improvement of the state-of-the-art fetal brain segmentation techniques, reducing the need for manual correction in automated SRR pipelines. Our code and our trained model are made publicly available at https://github.com/gift-surg/MONAIfbs.
Magnetic resonance (MR) imaging is an essential diagnostic tool in clinical medicine. Recently, a variety of deep learning methods have been applied to segmentation tasks in medical images, with promising results for computer-aided diagnosis. For MR images, effectively integrating different pulse sequences is important to optimize performance. However, the best way to integrate different pulse sequences remains unclear. In this study, we evaluate multiple architectural features and characterize their effects in the task of metastasis segmentation. Specifically, we consider (1) different pulse sequence integration schemas, (2) different modes of weight sharing for parallel network branches, and (3) a new approach for enabling robustness to missing pulse sequences. We find that levels of integration and modes of weight sharing that favor low variance work best in our regime of small data (n = 100). By adding an input-level dropout layer, we could preserve the overall performance of these networks while allowing for inference on inputs with missing pulse sequence. We illustrate not only the generalizability of the network but also the utility of this robustness when applying the trained model to data from a different center, which does not use the same pulse sequences. Finally, we apply network visualization methods to better understand which input features are most important for network performance. Together, these results provide a framework for building networks with enhanced robustness to missing data while maintaining comparable performance in medical imaging applications.
Brain tumor segmentation is a challenging problem in medical image analysis. The goal of brain tumor segmentation is to generate accurate delineation of brain tumor regions with correctly located masks. In recent years, deep learning methods have shown very promising performance in solving various computer vision problems, such as image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation. A number of deep learning based methods have been applied to brain tumor segmentation and achieved impressive system performance. Considering state-of-the-art technologies and their performance, the purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive survey of recently developed deep learning based brain tumor segmentation techniques. The established works included in this survey extensively cover technical aspects such as the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches, pre- and post-processing frameworks, datasets and evaluation metrics. Finally, we conclude this survey by discussing the potential development in future research work.
Gliomas are among the most aggressive and deadly brain tumors. This paper details the proposed Deep Neural Network architecture for brain tumor segmentation from Magnetic Resonance Images. The architecture consists of a cascade of three Deep Layer Aggregation neural networks, where each stage elaborates the response using the feature maps and the probabilities of the previous stage, and the MRI channels as inputs. The neuroimaging data are part of the publicly available Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) 2020 challenge dataset, where we evaluated our proposal in the BraTS 2020 Validation and Test sets. In the Test set, the experimental results achieved a Dice score of 0.8858, 0.8297 and 0.7900, with an Hausdorff Distance of 5.32 mm, 22.32 mm and 20.44 mm for the whole tumor, core tumor and enhanced tumor, respectively.