Brain tumour segmentation of MR images based on custom attention mechanism with transfer‐learning

Abstract

AbstractThe automatic segmentation of brain tumours is a critical task in patient disease management. It can help specialists easily identify the location, size, and type of tumour to make the best decisions regarding the patients' treatment process. Recently, deep learning methods with attention mechanism helped increase the performance of segmentation models. The proposed method consists of two main parts: the first part leverages a deep neural network architecture for biggest tumour detection (BTD) and in the second part, ResNet152V2 makes it possible to segment the image with the attention block and the extraction of local and global features. The custom attention block is used to consider the most important parts in the slices, emphasizing on related information for segmentation. The results show that the proposed method achieves average Dice scores of 0.81, 0.87 and 0.91 for enhancing core, tumour core and whole tumour on BraTS2020 dataset, respectively. Compared with other segmentation approaches, this method achieves better performance on tumour core and whole tumour. Further comparisons on BraTS2018 and BraTS2017 validation datasets show that this method outperforms other models based on Dice score and Hausdorff criterion.