MRS-Net: Brain tumour segmentation network based on feature fusion and attention mechanism

Abstract

Accurate segmentation of brain tumor magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is crucial for treatment planning. Addressing the challenges of complex tumor structures and inadequate cross-channel information utilization in Unet-based segmentation, this paper proposes the multi-scale residual brain tumor MRI segmentation network (MRS-Net) incorporating an attention mechanism to enhance segmentation accuracy. First, the double residual feature fusion module is utilized to enhance the fusion of feature information between different levels. Second, the Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling is introduced as a bridging module of the network to capture the features at different scales of the image, so as to enhance the extraction capability of the network for detailed features. Finally, the inverted residual coordinate attention module replaces the direct splicing in Unet to fuse the large feature information at each level and scale, thus enhancing the model's ability to recognize the spatial location information of brain tumors. The Dice coefficients, positive predictive values (PPVs), sensitivities (Sensitivity) and Hausdorff distance (HD), which are the four evaluation indexes, reach 84.54%, 87.43%, 88.37% and 2.248, respectively, which are improved by 1.85%, 2.11%, 2.88% and 6.0%, respectively, compared with Unet. The experimental results show that MRS-Net achieves better brain tumor image segmentation.