HTTU-Net: Hybrid Two Track U-Net for Automatic Brain Tumor Segmentation

Abstract

Brain cancer is one of the most dominant causes of cancer death; the best way to diagnose and treat brain tumors is to screen early. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is commonly used for brain tumor diagnosis; however, it is a challenging problem to achieve higher accuracy and performance, which is a vital problem in most of the previously presented automated medical diagnosis. In this paper, we propose a Hybrid Two-Track U-Net(HTTU-Net) architecture for brain tumor segmentation. This architecture leverages the use of Leaky Relu activation and batch normalization. It includes two tracks; each one has a different number of layers and utilizes a different kernel size. Then, we merge these two tracks to generate the final segmentation. We use the focal loss, and generalized Dice (GDL), loss functions to address the problem of class imbalance. The proposed segmentation method was evaluated on the BraTS'2018 datasets and obtained a mean Dice similarity coefficient of 0.865 for the whole tumor region, 0.808 for the core region and 0.745 for the enhancement region and a median Dice similarity coefficient of 0.883, 0.895, and 0.815 for the whole tumor, core and enhancing region, respectively. The proposed HTTU-Net architecture is sufficient for the segmentation of brain tumors and achieves highly accurate results. Other quantitative and qualitative evaluations are discussed, along with the paper. It confirms that our results are very comparable expert human-level performance and could help experts to decrease the time of diagnostic.

Keywords

• Brain tumor segmentation
• deep neural networks
• U-net
• fully convolutional network
• BraTS’2018 challenge