A Lightweight Brain Tumor Segmentation Network Based on 3D Inverted Residual Modules

Semantic segmentation technology based on deep learning has played an important role for doctors in identifying brain tumor regions and formulating treatment plans. Popular automated segmentation methods for brain tumors include 2D and 3D convolution networks. The 3D networks give better results but lead to a significant increase in parameters and computational cost. In this paper, we propose a lightweight brain tumor segmentation network composed of 3D inverted residual modules, which can significantly reduce the computational complexity of 3D models. Based on a lightweight depthwise separable convolution, our 3D inverted residual module extracts high-dimensional brain tumor features through an intermediate expansion layer, thus improving performance. On the brain tumor dataset BraTS 2018, our network achieves dice scores of 80.8%, 90.7%, and 84.3% (for ET, WT, and TC, respectively) with only 0.68M parameters and 51.46G FLOPs. The results show that our method can significantly reduce the complexity of the 3D model and achieve very competitive performance.