Fully Automatic Brain Tumor Segmentation using End-To-End Incremental Deep Neural Networks in MRI images

Background and objective: Nowadays, getting an efficient Brain Tumor Segmentation in Multi-Sequence MR images as soon as possible, gives an early clinical diagnosis, treatment and follow-up. The aim of this study is to develop a new deep learning model for the segmentation of brain tumors. The proposed models are used to segment the brain tumors of Glioblastomas (with both high and low grade). Glioblastomas have four properties: different sizes, shapes, contrasts, in addition, Glioblastomas appear anywhere in the brain.

Methods: In this paper, we propose three end-to-end Incremental Deep Convolutional Neural Networks models for fully automatic Brain Tumor Segmentation. Our proposed models are different from the other CNNs-based models that follow the technique of trial and error process which does not use any guided approach to get the suitable hyper-parameters. Moreover, we adopt the technique of Ensemble Learning to design a more efficient model. For solving the problem of training CNNs model, we propose a new training strategy which takes into account the most influencing hyper-parameters by bounding and setting a roof to these hyper-parameters to accelerate the training.

Results: Our experiment results reported on BRATS-2017 dataset. The proposed deep learning models achieve the state-of-the-art performance without any post-processing operations. Indeed, our models achieve in average 0.88 Dice score over the complete region. Moreover, the efficient design with the advantage of GPU implementation, allows our three deep learning models to achieve brain segmentation results in average 20.87 s.

Conclusions: The proposed deep learning models are effective for the segmentation of brain tumors and allow to obtain high accurate results. Moreover, the proposed models could help the physician experts to reduce the time of diagnostic.