Brain tumor segmentation using U-Net in conjunction with EfficientNet

Abstract

According to the Ten Leading Causes of Death Statistics Report by the Ministry of Health and Welfare in 2021, cancer ranks as the leading cause of mortality. Among them, pleomorphic glioblastoma is a common type of brain cancer. Brain cancer often occurs in the brain with unclear boundaries from normal brain tissue, necessitating assistance from experienced doctors to distinguish brain tumors before surgical resection to avoid damaging critical neural structures. In recent years, with the advancement of deep learning (DL) technology, artificial intelligence (AI) plays a vital role in disease diagnosis, especially in the field of image segmentation. This technology can aid doctors in locating and measuring brain tumors, while significantly reducing manpower and time costs. Currently, U-Net is one of the primary image segmentation techniques. It utilizes skip connections to combine high-level and low-level feature information, leading to significant improvements in segmentation accuracy. To further enhance the model’s performance, this study explores the feasibility of using EfficientNetV2 as an encoder in combination with U-net. Experimental results indicate that employing EfficientNetV2 as an encoder together with U-net can improve the segmentation model’s Dice score (loss = 0.0866, accuracy = 0.9977, and Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) = 0.9133).