SGEResU-Net for brain tumor segmentation

Abstract

The precise segmentation of tumor regions plays a pivotal role in the diagnosis and treatment of brain tumors. However, due to the variable location, size, and shape of brain tumors, the automatic segmentation of brain tumors is a relatively challenging application. Recently, U-Net related methods, which largely improve the segmentation accuracy of brain tumors, have become the mainstream of this task. Following merits of the 3D U-Net architecture, this work constructs a novel 3D U-Net model called SGEResU-Net to segment brain tumors. SGEResU-Net simultaneously embeds residual blocks and spatial group-wise enhance (SGE) attention blocks into a single 3D U-Net architecture, in which SGE attention blocks are employed to enhance the feature learning of semantic regions and reduce possible noise and interference with almost no extra parameters. Besides, the self-ensemble module is also utilized to improve the segmentation accuracy of brain tumors. Evaluation experiments on the Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) Challenge 2020 and 2021 benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SGEResU-Net for this medical application. Moreover, it achieves DSC values of 83.31, 91.64 and 86.85%, as well as Hausdorff distances (95%) of 19.278, 5.945 and 7.567 for the enhancing tumor, whole tumor, and tumor core on BraTS 2021 dataset, respectively.