Brain tumor segmentation based on the fusion of deep semantics and edge information in multimodal MRI

Abstract

Brain tumor segmentation in multimodal MRI has great significance in clinical diagnosis and treatment. The utilization of multimodal information plays a crucial role in brain tumor segmentation. However, most existing methods focus on the extraction and selection of deep semantic features, while ignoring some features with specific meaning and importance to the segmentation problem. In this paper, we propose a brain tumor segmentation method based on the fusion of deep semantics and edge information in multimodal MRI, aiming to achieve a more sufficient utilization of multimodal information for accurate segmentation. The proposed method mainly consists of a semantic segmentation module, an edge detection module and a feature fusion module. In the semantic segmentation module, the Swin Transformer is adopted to extract semantic features and a shifted patch tokenization strategy is introduced for better training. The edge detection module is designed based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and an edge spatial attention block (ESAB) is presented for feature enhancement. The feature fusion module aims to fuse the extracted semantic and edge features, and we design a multi-feature inference block (MFIB) based on graph convolution to perform feature reasoning and information dissemination for effective feature fusion. The proposed method is validated on the popular BraTS benchmarks. The experimental results verify that the proposed method outperforms a number of state-of-the-art brain tumor segmentation methods. The source code of the proposed method is available at https://github.com/HXY-99/brats.