A Deep Multi-Task Learning Framework for Brain Tumor Segmentation

Abstract

Glioma is the most common primary central nervous system tumor, accounting for about half of all intracranial primary tumors. As a non-invasive examination method, MRI has an extremely important guiding role in the clinical intervention of tumors. However, manually segmenting brain tumors from MRI requires a lot of time and energy for doctors, which affects the implementation of follow-up diagnosis and treatment plans. With the development of deep learning, medical image segmentation is gradually automated. However, brain tumors are easily confused with strokes and serious imbalances between classes make brain tumor segmentation one of the most difficult tasks in MRI segmentation. In order to solve these problems, we propose a deep multi-task learning framework and integrate a multi-depth fusion module in the framework to accurately segment brain tumors. In this framework, we have added a distance transform decoder based on the V-Net, which can make the segmentation contour generated by the mask decoder more accurate and reduce the generation of rough boundaries. In order to combine the different tasks of the two decoders, we weighted and added their corresponding loss functions, where the distance map prediction regularized the mask prediction. At the same time, the multi-depth fusion module in the encoder can enhance the ability of the network to extract features. The accuracy of the model will be evaluated online using the multispectral MRI records of the BraTS 2018, BraTS 2019, and BraTS 2020 datasets. This method obtains high-quality segmentation results, and the average Dice is as high as 78%. The experimental results show that this model has great potential in segmenting brain tumors automatically and accurately.

Keywords: automatic segmentation; brain tumor; deep multi-task learning framework; magnetic resonance imaging; multi-depth fusion module.