Abstract
Gliomas appear with wide variation in their characteristics both in terms of their appearance and location on brain MR images, which makes robust tumour segmentation highly challenging, and leads to high inter-rater variability even in manual segmentations. In this work, we propose a triplanar ensemble network, with an independent tumour core prediction module, for accurate segmentation of these tumours and their sub-regions. On evaluating our method on the MICCAI Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) challenge validation dataset, for tumour sub-regions, we achieved a Dice similarity coefficient of 0.77 for both enhancing tumour (ET) and tumour core (TC). In the case of the whole tumour (WT) region, we achieved a Dice value of 0.89, which is on par with the top-ranking methods from BraTS’17-19. Our method achieved an evaluation score that was the equal 5\(^{\text {th}}\) highest value (with our method ranking in 10\(^{\text {th}}\) place) in the BraTS’20 challenge, with mean Dice values of 0.81, 0.89 and 0.84 on ET, WT and TC regions respectively on the BraTS’20 unseen test dataset.
L. Griffanti and M. Jenkinson—Contributed equally to this work.
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Acknowledgements
The authors of this paper declare that their method for the BraTS’20 challenge has not used any pre-trained models nor additional datasets other than those provided by the organizers. This work was supported by Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, which has core funding from the Wellcome Trust (203139/Z/16/Z). VS is supported by Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging (203139/Z/16/Z). LG is supported by the Oxford Parkinson’s Disease Centre (Parkinson’s UK Monument Discovery Award, J-1403), the MRC Dementias Platform UK (MR/L023784/2), and the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre (BRC). MJ is supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), Oxford Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) and Wellcome Trust (215573/Z/19/Z). The computational aspects of this research were supported by the Wellcome Trust Core Award (203141/Z/16/Z) and the NIHR Oxford BRC. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR or the Department of Health.
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Sundaresan, V., Griffanti, L., Jenkinson, M. (2021). Brain Tumour Segmentation Using a Triplanar Ensemble of U-Nets on MR Images. In: Crimi, A., Bakas, S. (eds) Brainlesion: Glioma, Multiple Sclerosis, Stroke and Traumatic Brain Injuries. BrainLes 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12658. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72084-1_31
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