Magnetic resonance image-based brain tumour segmentation methods : a systematic review

Background: Image segmentation is an essential step in the analysis and subsequent characterisation of brain tumours through magnetic resonance imaging. In the literature, segmentation methods are empowered by open-access magnetic resonance imaging datasets, such as the brain tumour segmentation dataset. Moreover, with the increased use of artificial intelligence methods in medical imaging, access to larger data repositories has become vital in method development. Purpose: To determine what automated brain tumour segmentation techniques can medical imaging specialists and clinicians use to identify tumour components, compared to manual segmentation. Methods: We conducted a systematic review of 572 brain tumour segmentation studies during 2015–2020. We reviewed segmentation techniques using T1-weighted, T2-weighted, gadolinium-enhanced T1-weighted, fluid-attenuated inversion recovery, diffusion-weighted and perfusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging sequences. Moreover, we assessed physics or mathematics-based methods, deep learning methods, and software-based or semi-automatic methods, as applied to magnetic resonance imaging techniques. Particularly, we synthesised each method as per the utilised magnetic resonance imaging sequences, study population, technical approach (such as deep learning) and performance score measures (such as Dice score). Statistical tests: We compared median Dice score in segmenting the whole tumour, tumour core and enhanced tumour. Results: We found that T1-weighted, gadolinium-enhanced T1-weighted, T2-weighted and fluid-attenuated inversion recovery magnetic resonance imaging are used the most in various segmentation algorithms. However, there is limited use of perfusion-weighted and diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging. Moreover, we found that the U-Net deep learning technology is cited the most, and has high accuracy (Dice score 0.9) for magnetic resonance imaging-based brain tumour segmentation. Conclusion: U-Net is a promising deep learning technology for magnetic resonance imaging-based brain tumour segmentation. The community should be encouraged to contribute open-access datasets so training, testing and validation of deep learning algorithms can be improved, particularly for diffusion- and perfusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging, where there are limited datasets available

Brain Tumor Detection Based on a Novel and High-Quality Prediction of the Tumor Pixel Distributions

In this paper, we propose a system to detect brain tumor in 3D MRI brain scans of Flair modality. It performs 2 functions: (a) predicting gray-level and locational distributions of the pixels in the tumor regions and (b) generating tumor mask in pixel-wise precision. To facilitate 3D data analysis and processing, we introduced a 2D histogram presentation that comprehends the gray-level distribution and pixel-location distribution of a 3D object. In the proposed system, particular 2D histograms, in which tumor-related feature data get concentrated, are established by exploiting the left-right asymmetry of a brain structure. A modulation function is generated from the input data of each patient case and applied to the 2D histograms to attenuate the element irrelevant to the tumor regions. The prediction of the tumor pixel distribution is done in 3 steps, on the axial, coronal and sagittal slice series, respectively. In each step, the prediction result helps to identify/remove tumor-free slices, increasing the tumor information density in the remaining data to be applied to the next step. After the 3-step removal, the 3D input is reduced to a minimum bounding box of the tumor region. It is used to finalize the prediction and then transformed into a 3D tumor mask, by means of gray level thresholding and low-pass-based morphological operations. The final prediction result is used to determine the critical threshold. The proposed system has been tested extensively with the data of more than one thousand patient cases in the datasets of BraTS 2018~21. The test results demonstrate that the predicted 2D histograms have a high degree of similarity with the true ones. The system delivers also very good tumor detection results, comparable to those of state-of-the-art CNN systems with mono-modality inputs, which is achieved at an extremely low computation cost and no need for training

Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis

The accelerating power of deep learning in diagnosing diseases will empower physicians and speed up decision making in clinical environments. Applications of modern medical instruments and digitalization of medical care have generated enormous amounts of medical images in recent years. In this big data arena, new deep learning methods and computational models for efficient data processing, analysis, and modeling of the generated data are crucially important for clinical applications and understanding the underlying biological process. This book presents and highlights novel algorithms, architectures, techniques, and applications of deep learning for medical image analysis