Brain tumor segmentation based on the U-NET+⁣+ network with efficientnet encoder.

backgroundBrain tumor is a highly destructive, aggressive, and fatal disease. The presence of brain tumors can disrupt the brain's ability to control body movements, consciousness, sensations, thoughts, speech, and memory. Brain tumors are often accompanied by symptoms like epilepsy, headaches, and sensory loss, leading to varying degrees of cognitive impairment in affected patients.

objectiveThe study goal is to develop an effective method to detect and segment brain tumor with high accurancy.

methodsThis paper proposes a novel U-Net+⁣+ network using EfficientNet as the encoder to segment brain tumors based on MRI images. We adjust the original U-Net+⁣+ model by removing the dense skip connections between sub-networks to simplify computational complexity and improve model efficiency, while the connections of feature maps at the same resolution level are retained to bridge the semantic gap.

resultsThe proposed segmentation model is trained and tested on Kaggle's LGG brain tumor dataset, which obtains a satisfying performance with a Dice coefficient of 0.9180.

conclusionThis paper conducts research on brain tumor segmentation, using the U-Net+⁣+ network with EfficientNet as an encoder to segment brain tumors based on MRI images. We adjust the original U-Net+⁣+ model to simplify calculations and maintains rich semantic spatial features at the same time. Multiple loss functions are compared in this study and their effectiveness are discussed. The experimental results shows the model achieves a high segmention result with Dice coefficient of 0.9180.