Deep learning for brain tumor segmentation and survival prediction.

Abstract

A brain tumor is an abnormal growth of cells in the brain that multiplies uncontrolled. The death of people due to brain tumors has increased over the past few decades. Early diagnosis of brain tumors is essential in improving treatment possibilities and increasing the survival rate of patients. The life expectancy of patients with glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), the most malignant glioma, using the current standard of care is, on average, 14 months after diagnosis despite aggressive surgery, radiation, and chemotherapies. Despite considerable efforts in brain tumor segmentation research, patient diagnosis remains poor. Accurate segmentation of pathological regions may significantly impact treatment decisions, planning, and outcome monitoring. However, the large spatial and structural variability among brain tumors makes automatic segmentation a challenging problem, leaving brain tumor segmentation an open challenge that warrants further research endeavors. While several methods automatically segment brain tumors, deep learning methods are becoming widespread in medical imaging due to their resounding performance. However, the boost in performance comes at the cost of high computational complexity. Therefore, to improve the adoption rate of computer-assisted diagnosis in clinical setups, especially in developing countries, there is a need for more computational and memoryefficient models. In this research, using a few computational resources, we explore various techniques to develop deep learning models accurately for segmenting the different glioma sub-regions, namely the enhancing tumor, the tumor core, and the whole tumor. We quantitatively evaluate the performance of our proposed models against the state-of-the-art methods using magnetic resolution imaging (MRI) datasets provided by the Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) Challenge. Lastly, we use segmentation labels produced by the segmentation task and MRI multimodal data to extract appropriate imaging/radiomic features to train a deep learning model for overall patient survival prediction.