Brain Tumor Segmentation Using Non-local Mask R-CNN and Single Model Ensemble

Abstract

Gliomas are the most common primary malignant brain tumors. Accurate segmentation and quantitative analysis of brain tumor are critical for diagnosis and treatment planning. Automatically segmenting tumors and their subregions is a challenging task as demonstrated by the annual Multimodal Brain Tumor Segmentation Challenge (BraTS). In order to tackle this challenging task, we trained 2D non-local Mask R-CNN with 814 patients from the BraTS 2021 training dataset. Our performance on another 417 patients from the BraTS 2021 training dataset were as follows: DSC of 0.784, 0.851 and 0.817; sensitivity of 0.775, 0.844 and 0.825 for the enhancing tumor, whole tumor and tumor core, respectively. By applying the focal loss function, our method achieved a DSC of 0.775, 0.885 and 0.829, as well as sensitivity of 0.757, 0.877 and 0.801. We also experimented with data distillation to ensemble single model’s predictions. Our refined results were DSC of 0.797, 0.884 and 0.833; sensitivity of 0.820, 0.855 and 0.820.