Segmentation of Brain Tumor Tissues in HGG and LGG MR Images Using 3D U-net Convolutional Neural Network

The quantitative assessment of tumor extent is necessary for surgical planning, as well as monitoring of tumor growth or shrinkage, and radiotherapy planning. For brain tumors, magnetic resonance imaging MRI is used as a standard for diagnosis and prognosis. Manually segmenting brain tumors from 3D MRI volumes is tedious and depends on inter and intra observer variability. In the clinical facilities, a reliable fully automatic brain tumor segmentation method is necessary for the accurate delineation of tumor sub regions. This article presents a 3D U-net Convolutional Neural Network for segmentation of a brain tumor. The proposed method achieves a mean dice score of 0.83, a specificity of 0.80 and a sensitivity of 0.81 for segmenting the whole tumor, and for the tumor core region a mean dice score of 0.76, a specificity of 0.79 and a sensitivity of 0.73. For the enhancing region, the mean dice score is 0.68, a specificity of 0.73 and a sensitivity of 0.77. From the experimental analysis, the proposed U-net model achieved considerably good results compared to the other segmentation models.