GMetaNet: Multi-scale ghost convolutional neural network with auxiliary MetaFormer decoding path for brain tumor segmentation

Brain tumors are one of the deadliest cancers in the world. Researchers have conducted a lot of research work on brain tumor segmentation with good performance due to the rapid development of deep learning for assisting doctors in diagnosis and treatment. However, most of these methods cannot fully combine multiple feature information and their performances need to be improved. This study developed a novel network fusing local features representing detailed information, global features representing global information, and multi-scale features enhancing the model’s robustness to fully extract the features of brain tumors and proposed a novel axial-deformable attention module for modeling global information to improve the performance of brain tumor segmentation to assist clinicians in the automatic segmentation of brain tumors. Moreover, positional embeddings were used to make the network training faster and improve the method’s performance. Six metrics were used to evaluate the proposed method on the BraTS2018 dataset. Outstanding performance was obtained with Dice score, mean Intersection over Union, precision, recall, params, and inference time of 0.8735, 0.7756, 0.9477, 0.8769, 69.02 M, and 15.66 millisecond, respectively, for the whole tumor. Extensive experiments demonstrated that the proposed network obtained excellent performance and was helpful in providing supplementary advice to the clinicians.

Accurate and automated brain tumor segmentation using multi modal MR images is essential for the evaluation of the disease progression in order to improve disease diagnosis and treatment planning. We present a new fully automated method for high graded brain tumor segmentation combining sparse autoencoder and multimodal Fuzzy C-means clustering. The approach utilizes multimodal MRI contrast: T1, T2, FLAIR and T1c (contrast-enhanced) for 15 high graded glioma (HGG) subjects. The objective of the proposed study is to segment tumor tissues from HGG including edema and tumor core within edema. The segmentation was performed on the training data of the multimodal brain tumor image segmentation benchmark 2015. Sparse autoencoder, which is an unsupervised learning algorithm, was used to automatically learn features from unlabeled dataset of tumor in order to segment edema. Followed by edema segmentation, tumor core was segmented from edema using multimodal FCM clustering. Evaluating the performance of the segmentation results with the ground truth yields high dice score (DS) of 0.9866±0.01 and 0.9843±0.01 for edema and tumor core respectively and high Jaccard similarity (JS) of 0.9738±0.02 and 0.9692±0.02 for edema and tumor core respectively; showed high accuracy in segmenting the complex tumor structures from multi-contrast MR scans of HGG patients. We also compared our methodology in terms of segmentation efficiency with some recent techniques reported in proceedings of MICCAI-BRATS challenge 2015.

Gliomas are the most frequent primary brain tumors in adults. Improved quantification of the various aspects of a glioma requires accurate segmentation of the tumor in magnetic resonance images (MRI). Since the manual segmentation is time-consuming and subject to human error and irreproducibility, automatic segmentation has received a lot of attention in recent years. This paper presents a fully automated segmentation method which is capable of automatic segmentation of brain tumor from multi-modal MRI scans. The proposed method is comprised of a deeply-supervised neural network based on Holistically-Nested Edge Detection (HED) network. The HED method, which is originally developed for the binary classification task of image edge detection, is extended for multiple-class segmentation. The classes of interest include the whole tumor, tumor core, and enhancing tumor. The dataset provided by 2017 Multimodal Brain Tumor Image Segmentation Benchmark (BraTS) challenge is used in this work for training the neural network and performance evaluations. Experiments on BraTS 2017 challenge datasets demonstrate that the method performs well compared to the existing works. The assessments revealed the Dice scores of 0.86, 0.60, and 0.69 for whole tumor, tumor core, and enhancing tumor classes, respectively.

CLCU-Net: Cross-level connected U-shaped network with selective feature aggregation attention module for brain tumor segmentation

Gliomas are the most common and aggressive form of all brain tumors, with medial survival rates of less than two years for the highest grade. While accurate and reproducible segmentation of brain tumors is paramount for an effective treatment plan and diagnosis, automatic brain tumor segmentation is challenging because the lesion can appear anywhere in the brain with varying shapes and sizes from one patient to another. Moreover, segmentation is only done by analyzing pixel intensity values of surrounding tissues, and the diffusing nature of aggressive brain tumors makes it even more challenging to delineate tumor boundaries. Nevertheless, deep learning methods have superior performance in automatic brain tumor segmentation. However, their boost in performance comes at the cost of high computational complexity. This paper proposes efficient network architecture for 3D brain tumor segmentation, partially utilizing depthwise separable convolutions to reduce computational costs. The experimental results on the BraTS 2020 dataset show that our methods could achieve comparable results with the state-of-the-art methods with minimum computational complexity. Furthermore, we provide a critical analysis of the current efficient model designs. The code for this project is available at https://github.com/tmagadza/partialDepthwiseNet.

Medical image segmentation is a fundamental task in medical image analysis, playing a crucial role in disease diagnosis, treatment planning, and clinical decision-making. Accurate segmentation of anatomical structures, such as blood vessels, organs, and lesions, is essential for reliable medical interpretations. However, existing segmentation models often face challenges in effectively capturing both local and global features within medical images. Traditional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) excel at extracting fine-grained local features but struggle to model long-range dependencies due to their limited receptive fields. Conversely, transformer-based models can capture global contextual relationships but often fail to preserve detailed local structures, leading to suboptimal segmentation performance. The purpose of this study is to develop SEFormer, a novel hybrid network that integrates SENet, ResNet, and Transformer to enhance medical image segmentation. SEFormer aims to effectively capture both local and global features, addressing the limitations of traditional CNNs and transformer-based models.SENet is incorporated to recalibrate feature maps by adaptively emphasizing informative features, thereby compensating for the global representation limitations of CNNs. Meanwhile, the ResNet backbone ensures deep feature extraction while maintaining computational efficiency. Additionally, the Transformer module is introduced to capture long-range dependencies and enhance contextual awareness, complementing the local feature extraction capabilities of CNNs. This hybrid approach allows SEFormer to balance fine-grained spatial details with broader contextual information, leading to more precise segmentation results.Furthermore, to mitigate information loss during feature extraction and ensure a more complete and hierarchical representation of image information, we introduce a feature pyramid structure inspired by multi-scale image pyramid models. By progressively increasing the receptive field across different scales and employing skip connections, SEFormer effectively fuses multi-scale local and global features at each stage of the pyramid. This hierarchical fusion mechanism ensures a richer and more robust feature representation, which is particularly beneficial for segmenting complex medical structures such as blood vessels. We evaluate SEFormer on the CHASE_DB1 dataset, a widely used benchmark for retinal vessel segmentation. Experimental results demonstrate that SEFormer outperforms existing state-of-the-art segmentation methods, achieving a 3.25% improvement in segmentation accuracy. Additionally, we conduct ablation studies to verify the contributions of different components within SEFormer. The results show that incorporating SENet enhances feature recalibration and channel attention, while the Transformer module significantly improves global context awareness. The feature pyramid structure further contributes to performance gains by ensuring a multi-scale representation of vascular structures. Compared to conventional CNN-based methods, our approach achieves better segmentation accuracy with improved robustness to variations in vessel thickness, noise, and image contrast. Furthermore, SEFormer maintains computational efficiency, making it suitable for real-world clinical applications where both accuracy and processing speed are critical. SEFormer provides an efficient and accurate approach for medical image segmentation by leveraging the complementary strengths of CNNs, SENet, and Transformers while integrating a feature pyramid structure to maximize feature representation. Future research directions include extending SEFormer to other medical imaging modalities, such as CT and MRI scans, as well as exploring further optimization techniques to reduce computational costs while maintaining high segmentation performance. Additionally, integrating SEFormer with active learning frameworks could further improve segmentation performance by leveraging expert-annotated data more efficiently.

The segmentation of brain tumor plays an important role in diagnosis, treatment planning, and surgical simulation. The precise segmentation of brain tumor can help clinicians obtain its location, size, and shape information. We propose a fully automatic brain tumor segmentation method based on kernel sparse coding. It is validated with 3D multiple-modality magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In this method, MRI images are pre-processed first to reduce the noise, and then kernel dictionary learning is used to extract the nonlinear features to construct five adaptive dictionaries for healthy tissues, necrosis, edema, non-enhancing tumor, and enhancing tumor tissues. Sparse coding is performed on the feature vectors extracted from the original MRI images, which are a patch of m×m×m around the voxel. A kernel-clustering algorithm based on dictionary learning is developed to code the voxels. In the end, morphological filtering is used to fill in the area among multiple connected components to improve the segmentation quality. To assess the segmentation performance, the segmentation results are uploaded to the online evaluation system where the evaluation metrics dice score, positive predictive value (PPV), sensitivity, and kappa are used. The results demonstrate that the proposed method has good performance on the complete tumor region (dice: 0.83; PPV: 0.84; sensitivity: 0.82), while slightly worse performance on the tumor core (dice: 0.69; PPV: 0.76; sensitivity: 0.80) and enhancing tumor (dice: 0.58; PPV: 0.60; sensitivity: 0.65). It is competitive to the other groups in the brain tumor segmentation challenge. Therefore, it is a potential method in differentiation of healthy and pathological tissues.

There is an emerging need for medical imaging data to provide patients with timely diagnosis. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images based on brain tumor segmentation approaches possess greater importance in planning treatment. Though, mechanizing the process with different imaging conditions and accuracy is a major challenge due to variations in tumor structures. Hence, an efficient optimization-driven classifier, called BirCat optimization-based deep belief network (BirCat-based DBN)isdeveloped to detect brain tumors. The introduced BirCat is devised by incorporating birdswarm algorithm (BSA) into cat swarm optimization (CSO) algorithm and is employed in tuning the DBN classifier. Here, the first step is pre-processing, where noises, as well as artifacts in input image, are eliminated by means of ROI extraction and filtering method. Then, for segmentation, region growing algorithm is used in which the distance is calculated by the modified Bhattacharya measure. Afterward, each segment is adapted for mining the segment-based features and pixel-based features used for classification. Then, the feature vector is formed and given to the DBN classifier, which is tuned with the help of the introduced BirCat for brain tumor detection. The introduced technique effectively determines the regions with the tumor in the input MRI image. Finally, the change detection is evaluated by analyzing the post-operative MRI image and the segmented image by means of pixel mapping strategy with respect to SURF features. The pixel mapping is utilized to evaluate the percentage change in tumor pixels. The proposed BirCat surpassed other prevailing approaches by producing maximal values of specificity, accuracy, sensitivity, F1-score, and Dice score at 0.92, 0.927, 0.938, 0.909, and 0.937, correspondingly, for dataset 2.

Histopathological examination holds a crucial role in cancer grading and serves as a significant reference for devising individualized patient treatment plans in clinical practice. Nevertheless, the distinctive features of numerous histopathological image targets frequently contribute to suboptimal segmentation performance. In this paper, we propose a UNet-based multi-scale context fusion algorithm for medical image segmentation, which extracts rich contextual information by extracting semantic information at different encoding stages and assigns different weights to the semantic information at different scales through TBSFF module to improve the learning ability of the network for features. Through multi-scale context fusion and feature selection networks, richer semantic features and detailed information are extracted. The target can be more accurately segmented without significantly increasing the extra overhead. The results demonstrate that our algorithm achieves superior Dice and IoU scores with a relatively small parameter count. Specifically, on the GlaS dataset, the Dice score is 90.56, and IoU is 83.47. For the MoNuSeg dataset, the Dice score is 79.07, and IoU is 65.98.

Nowadays, there are various kinds of methods in medical image segmentation tasks, in which Cascaded FCN is an effective one. The idea of this method is to convert multiple classification tasks into a sequence of two categorization tasks, according to a series of sub-hierarchy regions of multi-modal Magnetic Resonance Images. We propose a model based on this idea, by combining the mainstream deep learning models for two dimensional images and modifying the 2D model to adapt to 3D medical image data set. Our model uses the Inception model, 3D Squeeze and Excitation structures, and dilated convolution filters, which are well known in 2D image segmentation tasks. When segmenting the whole tumor, we set the bounding box of the result, which is used to segment tumor core, and the bounding box of tumor core segmentation result will be used to segment enhancing tumor. We not only use the final output of the model, but also combine the results of intermediate output. In MICCAI BraTs 2018 gliomas segmentation task, we achieve a competitive performance without data augmentation.

Accurate and efficient automatic segmentation of brain tumors is critical for diagnosis and treatment. However, the diversity in the appearance, location, and shape of brain tumors and their subregions, coupled with complex boundaries, presents significant challenges. We aim to improve segmentation accuracy by addressing limitations in V-Net, including insufficient utilization of multi-scale features and difficulties in managing complex spatial relationships and long-range dependencies. We propose an improved network structure, dynamic convolution enhanced fusion axial V-Net (DCEF-AVNet), which integrates an enhanced feature fusion module and axial attention mechanisms. The feature fusion module integrates dynamic convolution with a redesigned skip connection strategy to effectively combine multi-scale features, reducing feature inconsistencies and improving representation capability. Axial attention mechanisms are introduced at encoder-decoder connections to manage spatial relationships and alleviate long-range dependency issues. The network was evaluated using the BraTS2021 dataset, with performance measured in terms of Dice coefficients and Hausdorff distances. DCEF-AVNet achieved Dice coefficients of 92.49%, 91.35%, and 91.96% for the whole tumor (WT), tumor core (TC), and enhancing tumor (ET) regions, respectively, significantly outperforming baseline methods. The model also demonstrated robust performance across multiple runs, with consistently low standard deviations in metrics. The integration of dynamic convolution, enhanced feature fusion, and axial attention mechanisms enables DCEF-AVNet to deliver superior segmentation accuracy and robustness. These results underscore its potential for advancing automated brain tumor segmentation and improving clinical decision-making.

The purpose of crowd counting is to estimate the number of pedestrians in crowd images. Crowd counting or density estimation is an extremely challenging task in computer vision, due to large scale variations and dense scene. Current methods solve these issues by compounding multi-scale Convolutional Neural Network with different receptive fields. In this paper, a novel end-to-end architecture based on Multi-Scale Adversarial Convolutional Neural Network (MSA-CNN) is proposed to generate crowd density and estimate the amount of crowd. Firstly, a multi-scale network is used to extract the globally relevant features in the crowd image, and then fractionally-strided convolutional layers are designed for up-sampling the output to recover the loss of crucial details caused by the earlier max pooling layers. An adversarial loss is directly employed to shrink the estimated value into the realistic subspace to reduce the blurring effect of density estimation. Joint training is performed in an end-to-end fashion using a combination of Adversarial loss and Euclidean loss. The two losses are integrated via a joint training scheme to improve density estimation performance.We conduct some extensive experiments on available datasets to show the significant improvements and supremacy of the proposed approach over the available state-of-the-art approaches.

Structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been widely utilized for analysis and diagnosis of brain diseases. Automatic segmentation of brain tumors is a challenging task for computer-aided diagnosis due to low-tissue contrast in the tumor subregions. To overcome this, we devise a novel pixel-wise segmentation framework through a convolutional 3D to 2D MR patch conversion model to predict class labels of the central pixel in the input sliding patches. Precisely, we first extract 3D patches from each modality to calibrate slices through the squeeze and excitation (SE) block. Then, the output of the SE block is fed directly into subsequent bottleneck layers to reduce the number of channels. Finally, the calibrated 2D slices are concatenated to obtain multimodal features through a 2D convolutional neural network (CNN) for prediction of the central pixel. In our architecture, both local inter-slice and global intra-slice features are jointly exploited to predict class label of the central voxel in a given patch through the 2D CNN classifier. We implicitly apply all modalities through trainable parameters to assign weights to the contributions of each sequence for segmentation. Experimental results on the segmentation of brain tumors in multimodal MRI scans (BraTS’19) demonstrate that our proposed method can efficiently segment the tumor regions.

Medical image segmentation is indispensable for diagnosis and prognosis of many diseases. To improve the segmentation performance, this study proposes a new 2D body and edge aware network with multi-scale short-term concatenation for medical image segmentation. Multi-scale short-term concatenation modules which concatenate successive convolution layers with different receptive fields, are proposed for capturing multi-scale representations with fewer parameters. Body generation modules with feature adjustment based on weight map computing via enlarging the receptive fields, and edge generation modules with multi-scale convolutions using Sobel kernels for edge detection, are proposed to separately learn body and edge features from convolutional features in decoders, making the proposed network be body and edge aware. Based on the body and edge modules, we design parallel body and edge decoders whose outputs are fused to achieve the final segmentation. Besides, deep supervision from the body and edge decoders is applied to ensure the effectiveness of the generated body and edge features and further improve the final segmentation. The proposed method is trained and evaluated on six public medical image segmentation datasets to show its effectiveness and generality. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better average Dice similarity coefficient and 95% Hausdorff distance than several benchmarks on all used datasets. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness of the proposed multi-scale representation learning modules, body and edge generation modules and deep supervision.

This paper presents an automatic method for brain tumour segmentation from magnetic resonance images. The method uses the feature vectors obtained by an efficient feature encoding approach which combines the advantages of the supervoxels and sparse coding techniques. Extremely Randomized Trees (ERT) algorithm is trained using these feature vectors to detect the whole tumour and for multi-label classification of abnormal tissues. A Conditional Random Field (CRF) algorithm is implemented to delimit the region where the brain tumour is located. The obtained predictions of the ERT are used to estimate probability maps. The probability maps of the images and the Euclidean distance between the feature vectors of neighbour supervoxels define the conditional random field energy function. The minimization of the energy function is performed via graph cuts. The proposed methods are evaluated on real patient data obtained from BraTS 2018 challenge. Results demonstrate that proposed method achieves a competitive performance on the validation dataset using Dice score is: 0.5719, 0.7992 and 0.6285 for enhancing tumuor, whole tumour and tumour core respectively. The achieved performance of this method on testing set using Dice score is: 0.5081, 0.7278 and 0.5778 for enhancing tumuor, whole tumour and tumour core respectively.