Prediction of Survival of Glioblastoma Patients Using Local Spatial Relationships and Global Structure Awareness in FLAIR MRI Brain Images

Abstract

This article introduces a framework for predicting the survival of brain tumor patients by analyzing magnetic resonance images. The prediction of brain tumor survival is challenging due to the limited size of available datasets. To overcome the issue of overfitting, we propose a self-supervised learning method that involves identifying image patches from the same or different images. By recognizing intra- and inter-image differences, the network can learn the relationships between local spatial windows in the same image and across different images. In addition to analyzing local information, we also incorporate a global structure awareness network to capture global information from the entire image. Our proposed method shows a strong correlation between local spatial relationships and survivor class prediction in FLAIR MRI brain images. We evaluate our method using the BraTS 2020 validation dataset and observe that our method outperforms others in accuracy and SpearmanR correlation metrics.

Keywords

• Brain tumor
• survival prediction
• local context
• global structure
• deep learning