A deep-learning model with learnable group convolution and deep supervision for brain tumor segmentation

Abstract

The segmentation of brain tumors in medical images is a crucial step of clinical treatment. Manual segmentation is time consuming and labor intensive, and existing automatic segmentation methods suffer from issues such as numerous parameters and low precision. To resolve these issues, this study proposes a learnable group convolution-based segmentation method that replaces convolution in the feature extraction stage with learnable group convolution, thereby reducing the number of convolutional network parameters and enhancing communication between convolution groups. To improve utilization of the feature maps, we added a skip connection structure between learnable group convolution modules, which increased segmentation precision. We used deep supervision to combine output images in the network output stage to reduce overfitting and enhance the recognition capabilities of the network. We tested the proposed algorithm model using the open BraTS 2018 dataset. The experiment results revealed that the proposed model is superior to 3D U-Net and DMFNet and has better segmentation results for tumor cores than No New-Net and NVDLMED, the winning methods in the BraTS 2018 challenge. The segmentation precision of the proposed method with regard to whole tumors, enhancing tumors, and tumor cores was 90.25%, 80.36%, and 86.20%. Furthermore, the proposed method uses fewer parameters and a less complex model.