Deep-MiSR: Multi-Scale Convolution and Attention-Enhanced DeepLabV3+ for Brain Tumor Segmentation in MRI
Md Parvej Mosharaf, Jie Su, Jing Zhang · Applied Sciences · 2026
Accurate brain tumor segmentation in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is essential for diagnosis, treatment planning, and therapy monitoring. Conventional deep learning models often struggle with large variations in tumor shape, size, and contrast, as well as severe foreground–background imbalance. To address these challenges, this study presents Deep-MiSR, an enhanced encoder–decoder framework built upon DeepLabV3+ with a MobileNetV2 backbone, tailored for single-modality contrast-enhanced T1-weighted (T1CE) MRI segmentation. Three complementary components are integrated into the architecture: mixed depthwise convolution (MixConv) with heterogeneous kernels within the atrous spatial pyramid pooling module for multi-scale feature aggregation, a squeeze-and-excitation block for adaptive channel recalibration, and R-Drop regularization that enforces prediction consistency via symmetric Kullback–Leibler divergence. The model was evaluated on 3064 T1CE slices from 233 patients drawn from the publicly available Nanfang Hospital brain MRI dataset. Deep-MiSR achieved a Dice similarity coefficient of 0.9281, a mean intersection-over-union of 0.8738, a precision of 0.8839, and a 95th-percentile Hausdorff distance of 7.69 mm, demonstrating consistent improvements over both the DeepLabV3+ baseline and all prior methods evaluated on the same data. Ablation studies confirmed that each component contributes independently, with R-Drop providing the largest individual gain. These findings demonstrate that combining multi-scale convolution, channel attention, and consistency regularization constitutes an effective and computationally practical strategy for robust single-modality brain tumor segmentation.