DAUnet: A U-shaped network combining deep supervision and attention for brain tumor segmentation

In MRI images, the brain tumor area varies greatly between individuals, and only relying on the judgment of clinicians is prone to misdiagnosis and misjudgment. Consequently, utilizing computer-aided diagnosis is of utmost significance in assisting clinicians with delineating the tumor region. Brain tumor MRI images are 3D images, and traditional segmentation methods tend to lose key information. Therefore, this paper proposes DAUnet, a U-shaped network for brain tumor MRI image segmentation combining deep supervision and convolutional attention. First, a module consisting of a Bottleneck module and attention (BA) module is designed. Here the attention not only uses spatial and channel (SC) attention but also adds residual connection, which is called 3D SC attention. Second, to enlarge the feature map receptive field without changing its resolution, a module consists of standard convolution and atrous spatial pyramid (CASP) module is designed. The feature map information is adjusted by standard convolution, subsequently, the feature map is provided as input to the ASP module. The CASP module fuses the features extracted by downsampling and performs upsampling operation, which strengthens the correlation between different layers of the network. Finally, using deep supervision as an auxiliary branch of the U-shaped network, it combines deep learning and regularization techniques to supervise the model during training, automatically finer parameters, and make the model fit better. Through experiments on BraTS 2020 and FeTS 2021 and comparison with other advanced methods, it has been demonstrated that DAUnet achieves precise segmentation of tumor regions in brain MRI images.