A Fast and Precise Method to Search for Desirable Rectangular Tumor Regions in Brain MR Images

To develop a fast and precise method for searching rectangular regions in brain tumor images.

The authors propose a new method for searching rectangular tumor regions in brain MR images. The proposed method consisted of a segmentation network and a fast search method with a user-controllable search metric. As the segmentation network, the U-Net whose encoder was replaced by the EfficientNet was used. In the fast search method, summed-area tables were used for accelerating sums of voxels in rectangular regions. Use of the summed-area tables enabled exhaustive search of the 3D offset (3D full search). The search metric was designed for giving priority to nearly isotropic rectangles over undesirable thin rectangles, and assigning better values for higher tumor fractions even if they exceeded target tumor fractions. The proposed computation and metric were compared with those used in a conventional method using the Brain Tumor Image Segmentation dataset.

When the 3D full search was used, the proposed computation (8 seconds) was 100-500 times faster than the conventional computation (11-40 minutes). When the user-controllable parts of the search metrics were changed variously, the tumor fractions of the proposed metric were higher than those of the conventional metric. In addition, the conventional metric preferred undesirable thin rectangles whereas the proposed metric preferred nearly isotropic rectangles.

The proposed method is promising for implementing fast and precise search of rectangular tumor regions, which is useful for brain tumor diagnosis using MRI systems. The proposed computation reduced processing times of the 3D full search, and the proposed metric improved the quality of the assigned rectangular tumor regions.