Brain tumor segmentation based on 3D residual U-Net

Abstract

We propose a deep learning based approach for automatic brain tumor segmentation utilizing a three-dimensional U-Net extended by residual connections. In this work, we did not incorporate architectural modifications to the existing 3D U-Net, but rather evaluated different training strategies for potential improvement of performance. Our model was trained on the dataset of the International Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) challenge 2019 that comprise multi-parametric magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI) scans from 335 patients diagnosed with a glial tumor. Furthermore, our model was evaluated on the BraTS 2019 independent validation data that consisted of another 125 brain tumor mpMRI scans. The results that our 3D Residual U-Net obtained on the BraTS 2019 test data are Mean Dice scores of 0.697, 0.828, 0.772 and Hausdorff95 distances of 25.56, 14.64, 26.69 for enhancing tumor, whole tumor, and tumor core, respectively. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.