Segmentation of Gliomas Based on a Double-Pathway Residual Convolution Neural Network Using Multi-Modality Information

The automatic segmentation of brain tumors in magnetic resonance (MR) images is very important in the diagnosis, radiotherapy planning, surgical navigation and several other clinical processes. As the location, size, shape, boundary of gliomas are heterogeneous, segmenting gliomas and intratumoral structures is very difficult. Besides, the multi-center issue makes it more challenging that multimodal brain gliomas images (such as T1, T2, fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR), and Tic images) are from different radiation centers. This paper presents a multimodal, multi-scale, double-pathway, 3D residual convolution neural network (CNN) for automatic gliomas segmentation. In the pre-processing step, a robust gray-level normalization method is proposed to solve the multi-center problem, that the intensity range from deferent centers varies a lot. Then, a double-pathway 3D architecture based on DeepMedic toolkit is trained using multi-modality information to fuse the local and context features. In the post-processing step, a fully connected conditional random field (CRF) is built to improve the performance, filling and connecting the isolated segmentations and holes. Experiments on the Multimodal Brain Tumor Segmentation (BRATS) 2017 and 2019 dataset showed that this methods can delineate the whole tumor with a Dice coefficient, a sensitivity and a positive predictive value (PPV) of 0.88, 0.89 and 0.88, respectively. As for the segmentation of the tumor core and the enhancing area, the sensitivity reached 0.80. The results indicated that this method can segment gliomas and intratumoral structures from multimodal MR images accurately, and it possesses a clinical practice value.