3D Brain Tumor Segmentation and Survival Prediction Using Ensembles of Convolutional Neural Networks

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are the state of the art in many medical image applications, including brain tumor segmentation. However, no successful studies using CNNs have been reported for survival prediction in glioma patients. In this work, we present two different solutions: tumor segmentation and the other for survival prediction. We proposed using an ensemble of asymmetric U-Net like architectures to improve segmentation results in the enhancing tumor region and the use of a DenseNet model for survival prognosis. We quantitatively compare deep learning with classical regression and classification models based on radiomics features and growth tumor models features for survival prediction on the BraTS 2020 database, and we provide an insight into the limitations of these models to accurately predict survival. Our method's current performance on the BraTS 2020 test set is dice scores of 0.80, 0.87, and 0.80 for enhancing tumor, whole tumor, and tumor core, respectively, with an overall dice of 0.82. For the survival prediction task, we got a 0.57 accuracy. In addition, we proposed a voxel-wise uncertainty estimation of our segmentation method that can be used effectively to improve brain tumor segmentation.