3D Semantic Segmentation of Brain Tumor for Overall Survival Prediction
Rupal R. Agravat, Mehul S. Raval · Lecture notes in computer science · 2021
Glioma, a malignant brain tumor, requires immediate treatment to improve the survival of patients. The heterogeneous nature of Glioma makes the segmentation difficult, especially for sub-regions like necrosis, enhancing tumor, non-enhancing tumor, and edema. Deep neural networks like full convolution neural networks and an ensemble of fully convolution neural networks are successful for Glioma segmentation. The paper demonstrates the use of a 3D fully convolution neural network with a three-layer encoder-decoder approach. The dense connections within the layer help in diversified feature learning. The network takes 3D patches from $$T_{1}$$ , $$T_{2}$$ , $$T_{1}c$$ , and FLAIR modalities as input. The loss function combines dice loss and focal loss functions. The Dice similarity coefficient for training and validation set is 0.88, 0.83, 0.78 and 0.87, 0.75, 0.76 for the whole tumor, tumor core and enhancing tumor, respectively. The network achieves comparable performance with other state-of-the-art ensemble approaches. The random forest regressor trains on the shape, volumetric, and age features extracted from ground truth for overall survival prediction. The regressor achieves an accuracy of 56.8% and 51.7% on the training and validation sets.