Improving brain tumor segmentation with anatomical prior-informed pre-training
Kang Wang, Zeyang Li, Haoran Wang, Siyu Liu, Mingyuan Pan, Manning Wang, Shuo Wang, Zhijian Song · Frontiers in Medicine · 2023
Introduction: Precise delineation of glioblastoma in multi-parameter magnetic resonance images is pivotal for neurosurgery and subsequent treatment monitoring. Transformer models have shown promise in brain tumor segmentation, but their efficacy heavily depends on a substantial amount of annotated data. To address the scarcity of annotated data and improve model robustness, self-supervised learning methods using masked autoencoders have been devised. Nevertheless, these methods have not incorporated the anatomical priors of brain structures. Methods: This study proposed an anatomical prior-informed masking strategy to enhance the pre-training of masked autoencoders, which combines data-driven reconstruction with anatomical knowledge. We investigate the likelihood of tumor presence in various brain structures, and this information is then utilized to guide the masking procedure. Results: Compared with random masking, our method enables the pre-training to concentrate on regions that are more pertinent to downstream segmentation. Experiments conducted on the BraTS21 dataset demonstrate that our proposed method surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art self-supervised learning techniques. It enhances brain tumor segmentation in terms of both accuracy and data efficiency. Discussion: Tailored mechanisms designed to extract valuable information from extensive data could enhance computational efficiency and performance, resulting in increased precision. It's still promising to integrate anatomical priors and vision approaches.