Three-Plane-assembled Deep Learning Segmentation of Gliomas

To design a computational method for automatic brain glioma segmentation of multimodal MRI scans with high efficiency and accuracy.

The 2018 Multimodal Brain Tumor Segmentation Challenge (BraTS) dataset was used in this study, consisting of routine clinically acquired preoperative multimodal MRI scans. Three subregions of glioma-the necrotic and nonenhancing tumor core, the peritumoral edema, and the contrast-enhancing tumor-were manually labeled by experienced radiologists. Two-dimensional U-Net models were built using a three-plane-assembled approach to segment three subregions individually (three-region model) or to segment only the whole tumor (WT) region (WT-only model). The term three-plane-assembled means that coronal and sagittal images were generated by reformatting the original axial images. The model performance for each case was evaluated in three classes: enhancing tumor (ET), tumor core (TC), and WT.

On the internal unseen testing dataset split from the 2018 BraTS training dataset, the proposed models achieved mean Sørensen-Dice scores of 0.80, 0.84, and 0.91, respectively, for ET, TC, and WT. On the BraTS validation dataset, the proposed models achieved mean 95% Hausdorff distances of 3.1 mm, 7.0 mm, and 5.0 mm, respectively, for ET, TC, and WT and mean Sørensen-Dice scores of 0.80, 0.83, and 0.91, respectively, for ET, TC, and WT. On the BraTS testing dataset, the proposed models ranked fourth out of 61 teams. The source code is available at https://github.com/GuanLab/Brain_Glioma.

This deep learning method consistently segmented subregions of brain glioma with high accuracy, efficiency, reliability, and generalization ability on screening images from a large population, and it can be efficiently implemented in clinical practice to assist neuro-oncologists or radiologists. Supplemental material is available for this article. © RSNA, 2020.