Brain Tumor Segmentation on MRI with Missing Modalities

Abstract

Brain Tumor Segmentation from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a critical technique for early diagnosis. However, rather than having complete four modalities as in BraTS dataset, it is common to have missing modalities in clinical scenarios. We design a brain tumor segmentation algorithm that is robust to the absence of any modality. Our network includes a channel-independent encoding path and a feature-fusion decoding path. We use self-supervised training through channel dropout and also propose a novel domain adaptation method on feature maps to recover the information from the missing channel. Our results demonstrate that the quality of the segmentation depends on which modality is missing. Furthermore, we also discuss and visualize the contribution of each modality to the segmentation results. Their contributions are along well with the expert screening routine.