Multi-scale features and attention guided for brain tumor segmentation

Brain tumor segmentation supplies a credible reference for clinical treatment and pathological research and facilitates practitioners to diagnose more accurately. However, since the randomness and complexity of tumor shape and location, automatic brain tumor segmentation remains an extremely challenging assignment. In this study, we build an end-to-end convolutional neural network with a U-shaped structure to implement the segmentation of three lesion regions. We propose a multi-scale context block and an attention guidance block to focus on the spatial information at different scales and the interdependence between feature channels to enhance network representations and boost the learning capability of the model. Specifically, the multi-scale context block draws rich feature information through 3D dilated convolution. The attention guidance block reduces the impact of learned redundant features and eliminates the interference of irrelevant regions in the overall global information. Our recommended approach is evaluated on the brain tumor segmentation 2020 validation data. The Dice scores of the enhancing tumor (ET), whole tumor (WT), and tumor core (TC) are 78.19%, 90.10%, and 83.98%, respectively. In addition, the practice is also carried out in 2019 online validation data, and the Dice scores of ET, WT, and TC are 77.31%, 89.64%, and 82.55%, respectively. Experimental results reveal that the recommended approach gains favorable performance in comparison with representative brain tumor segmentation approaches. Our present study would accurately and efficaciously segment the three brain lesion regions and has clinical practice value.