MLRD-Net: 3D multiscale local cross-channel residual denoising network for MRI-based brain tumor segmentation

The precise segmentation of multimodal MRI images is the primary stage of tumor diagnosis and treatment. Current segmentation strategies often underutilize multiscale features, which can easily lead to loss of contextual information, reduction of low-level features and noise interference. To overcome these issues, a 3D multiscale local cross-channel residual denoising network (MLRD-Net) for an MRI-based brain tumor segmentation algorithm is proposed in this paper. Specifically, we employ encoder-decoder structure to connect local and global features, and enhance the receptive field of the network. Random slice operation has been conducted to enhance robustness. Then, residual blocks with pre-activation operation are developed in down-sampling stage, which effectively improves signal propagation along the network and alleviates network overfitting. Finally, the local cross-channel denoising mechanism is established to eliminate unimportant features without dimensionality reduction. Our proposal was evaluated in Brain Tumor Segmentation 2020 dataset (BraTS 2020), obtaining significantly improved results with mean Dice Similarity Coefficient metric of 0.91, 0.79, and 0.73 for the complete, tumor core, and enhancing tumor regions respectively. Besides, we conduct further practice on BraTS 2019, with the mean Dice Similarity Coefficient metric of 0.89, 0.80, and 0.75. Massive experiments demonstrate that our method is powerful and reliable. It increases little model complexity while achieving very competitive performance.