Oropharyngeal primary tumor segmentation for radiotherapy planning on magnetic resonance imaging using deep learning

Brain tumors are the growth of abnormal cells or a mass in a brain. Numerous kinds of brain tumors were discovered, which need accurate and early detection techniques. Currently, most diagnosis and detection methods rely on the decision of neuro-specialists and radiologists to evaluate brain images, which may be time-consuming and cause human errors. This paper proposes a robust U-Net deep learning Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model that can classify if the subject has a tumor or not based on Brain Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) with acceptable accuracy for medical-grade application. The study built and trained the 3D U-Net CNN including encoding/decoding relationship architecture to perform the brain tumor segmentation because it requires fewer training images and provides more precise segmentation. The algorithm consists of three parts; the first part, the downsampling part, the bottleneck part, and the optimum part. The resultant semantic maps are inserted into the decoder fraction to obtain the full-resolution probability maps. The developed U-Net architecture has been applied on the MRI scan brain tumor segmentation dataset in MICCAI BraTS 2017. The results using Matlab-based toolbox indicate that the proposed architecture has been successfully evaluated and experienced for MRI datasets of brain tumor segmentation including 336 images as training data and 125 images for validation. This work demonstrated comparative performance and successful feasibility of implementing U-Net CNN architecture in an automated framework of brain tumor segmentations in Fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) MR Slices. The developed U-Net CNN model succeeded in performing the brain tumor segmentation task to classify the input brain images into a tumor or not based on the MRI dataset.

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Tumor Segmentation in Contrast-Enhanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging for Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma: Deep Learning with Convolutional Neural Network

BioMed Research International ◽

10.1155/2018/9128527 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 2018 ◽

pp. 1-7 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Qiaoliang Li ◽

Yuzhen Xu ◽

Zhewei Chen ◽

Dexiang Liu ◽

Shi-Ting Feng ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Neural Network ◽

Magnetic Resonance Imaging ◽

Deep Learning ◽

Magnetic Resonance ◽

Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma ◽

Convolutional Neural Network ◽

Tumor Segmentation ◽

Dice Similarity Coefficient ◽

Resonance Imaging ◽

Contrast Enhanced

Objectives. To evaluate the application of a deep learning architecture, based on the convolutional neural network (CNN) technique, to perform automatic tumor segmentation of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). Materials and Methods. In this prospective study, 87 MRI containing tumor regions were acquired from newly diagnosed NPC patients. These 87 MRI were augmented to >60,000 images. The proposed CNN network is composed of two phases: feature representation and scores map reconstruction. We designed a stepwise scheme to train our CNN network. To evaluate the performance of our method, we used case-by-case leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV). The ground truth of tumor contouring was acquired by the consensus of two experienced radiologists. Results. The mean values of dice similarity coefficient, percent match, and their corresponding ratio with our method were 0.89±0.05, 0.90±0.04, and 0.84±0.06, respectively, all of which were better than reported values in the similar studies. Conclusions. We successfully established a segmentation method for NPC based on deep learning in contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging. Further clinical trials with dedicated algorithms are warranted.

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