Extending nn-UNet for Brain Tumor Segmentation

Brain tumor segmentation is essential for the diagnosis and prognosis of patients with gliomas. The brain tumor segmentation challenge has provided an abundant and high-quality data source to develop automatic algorithms for the task. This paper describes our contribution to the 2021 competition. We developed our methods based on nn-UNet, the winning entry of last year's competition. We experimented with several modifications, including using a larger network, replacing batch normalization with group normalization and utilizing axial attention in the decoder. Internal 5-fold cross-validation and online evaluation from the organizers showed a minor improvement in quantitative metrics compared to the baseline. The proposed models won first place in the final ranking on unseen test data, achieving a dice score of 88.35%, 88.78%, 93.19% for the enhancing tumor, the tumor core, and the whole tumor, respectively. The codes, pretrained weights, and docker image for the winning submission are publicly available.