An Ensemble of Deep Learning Object Detection Models for Anatomical and Pathological Regions in Brain MRI

This paper proposes ensemble strategies for the deep learning object detection models carried out by combining the variants of a model and different models to enhance the anatomical and pathological object detection performance in brain MRI. In this study, with the help of the novel Gazi Brains 2020 dataset, five different anatomical parts and one pathological part that can be observed in brain MRI were identified, such as the region of interest, eye, optic nerves, lateral ventricles, third ventricle, and a whole tumor. Firstly, comprehensive benchmarking of the nine state-of-the-art object detection models was carried out to determine the capabilities of the models in detecting the anatomical and pathological parts. Then, four different ensemble strategies for nine object detectors were applied to boost the detection performance using the bounding box fusion technique. The ensemble of individual model variants increased the anatomical and pathological object detection performance by up to 10% in terms of the mean average precision (mAP). In addition, considering the class-based average precision (AP) value of the anatomical parts, an up to 18% AP improvement was achieved. Similarly, the ensemble strategy of the best different models outperformed the best individual model by 3.3% mAP. Additionally, while an up to 7% better FAUC, which is the area under the TPR vs. FPPI curve, was achieved on the Gazi Brains 2020 dataset, a 2% better FAUC score was obtained on the BraTS 2020 dataset. The proposed ensemble strategies were found to be much more efficient in finding the anatomical and pathological parts with a small number of anatomic objects, such as the optic nerve and third ventricle, and producing higher TPR values, especially at low FPPI values, compared to the best individual methods.