Semi-supervised multiple evidence fusion for brain tumor segmentation

The performance of deep learning-based methods depends mainly on the availability of large-scale labeled learning data. However, obtaining precisely annotated examples is challenging in the medical domain. Although some semi-supervised deep learning methods have been proposed to train models with fewer labels, only a few studies have focused on the uncertainty caused by the low quality of the images and the lack of annotations. This paper addresses the above issues using Dempster-Shafer theory and deep learning: 1) a semi-supervised learning algorithm is proposed based on an image transformation strategy; 2) a probabilistic deep neural network and an evidential neural network are used in parallel to provide two sources of segmentation evidence; 3) Dempster’s rule is used to combine the two pieces of evidence and reach a final segmentation result. Results from a series of experiments on the BraTS2019 brain tumor dataset show that our framework achieves promising results when only some training data are labeled.