Two-Branch network for brain tumor segmentation using attention mechanism and super-resolution reconstruction

Accurate segmentation of brain tumor plays an important role in MRI diagnosis and treatment monitoring of brain tumor. However, the degree of lesions in each patient's brain tumor region is usually inconsistent, with large structural differences, and brain tumor MR images are characterized by low contrast and blur, current deep learning algorithms often cannot achieve accurate segmentation. To address this problem, we propose a novel end-to-end brain tumor segmentation algorithm by integrating the improved 3D U-Net network and super-resolution image reconstruction into one framework. In addition, the coordinate attention module is embedded before the upsampling operation of the backbone network, which enhances the capture ability of local texture feature information and global location feature information. To demonstrate the segmentation results of the proposed algorithm in different brain tumor MR images, we have trained and evaluated the proposed algorithm on BraTS datasets, and compared with other deep learning algorithms by dice similarity scores. On the BraTS2021 dataset, the proposed algorithm achieves the dice similarity score of 89.61%, 88.30%, 91.05%, and the Hausdorff distance (95%) of 1.414 mm, 7.810 mm, 4.583 mm for the enhancing tumors, tumor cores and whole tumors, respectively. The experimental results illuminate that our method outperforms the baseline 3D U-Net method and yields good performance on different datasets. It indicated that it is robust to segmentation of brain tumor MR images with structures vary considerably.