On segmentation of brain tumors by MRI images with deep learning methods

Segmentation of a brain tumor is one of the most difficult tasks in the analysis of medical images. The purpose of brain tumor segmentation is to create an accurate outline of brain tumor areas. Gliomas are the most common type of brain tumors. Diagnosis of patients with this disease is based on the analysis of the results of magnetic resonance imaging and segmentation of the tumor boundaries manually. However, due to the time-consuming nature of the manual segmentation process and errors, there is a need for a fast and reliable automatic segmentation algorithm. In recent years, deep learning methods have shown promising effectiveness in solving various computer vision problems, such as image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation. A number of methods based on deep learning have been applied to segmentation of brain tumors, and promising results have been achieved. The article proposes a hybrid method for solving the problem of segmentation of brain tumors based on its MRI images based on the U-Net architecture, the encoder of which uses a model of a deep convolutional neural network pre-trained on a set of ImageNet images. Among such models were used VGG16, VGG19, MobileNetV2, Inception, ResNet50, EfficientNetb7, InceptionResnetV2, DenseNet201, DenseNet121. Based on the hybrid method, the TL-U-Net model was implemented, and numerical experiments were carried out to train it with different encoder models for segmentation of brain tumors based on its MRI images. Computer experiments on a set of MRI images of the brain showed the effectiveness of the proposed approach, the best encoder model turned out to be the neural network Densenet121, which provided indicators of segmentation accuracy MeanIoU=90.34%, MeanDice=94.33%, accuracy=94.17%. The obtained estimates of segmentation accuracy are comparable or exceed similar estimates obtained by other researchers.