HRGUNet: A novel high-resolution generative adversarial network combined with an improved UNet method for brain tumor segmentation

Abstract

Brain tumor segmentation in MRI images is challenging due to variability in tumor characteristics and low contrast. We propose HRGUNet, which combines a high-resolution generative adversarial network with an improved UNet architecture to enhance segmentation accuracy. Our proposed GAN model uses an innovative discriminator design that is able to process complete tumor labels as input. This approach can better ensure that the generator produces realistic tumor labels compared to some existing GAN models that only use local features. Additionally, we introduce a Multi-Scale Pyramid Fusion (MSPF) module to improve fine-grained feature extraction and a Refined Channel Attention (RCA) module to enhance focus on tumor regions. In comparative experiments, our method was verified on the BraTS2020 and BraTS2019 data sets, and the average Dice coefficient increased by 1.5% and 1.2% respectively, and the Hausdorff distance decreased by 23.9% and 15.2% respectively, showing its robustness and generalization for segmenting complex tumor structures.