3D AttU-NET for Brain Tumor Segmentation with a Novel Loss Function

Abstract

In the United States of America (USA), every year 150,000 patients are registered with a secondary brain tumor that is not generated in the brain. This necessitates the need for early brain tumor detection, which in turn will help patients to live longer. For clinical evaluation and treatment, precise segmentation of brain tumors in MRI images is required. This process can be aided by machine learning and efficient image processing, but manual imaging can be time-consuming. In this study, we aim to develop an 3D automated segmentation algorithm with a novel loss function. A 3D attention UNET CNN model was trained using the novel loss function, which was calculated by taking the weighted average of dice loss and focal loss to overcome the class imbalance. Results show the enhancement in the segmentation performance of attention UNET model with an average increase of 5% in the Dice coefficient for all three classes. However, the model’s performance was not as strong for enhanced and core tumors. Further research may be needed to optimize performance in these areas.