Remu-Net: Multi-Branch Net Framework for 3D Brain Tumor Segmentation

As one of the fatal human diseases, early detection of brain tumors can effectively save patients’ lives. Brain tumor image segmentation is of great practical importance for physicians to perform brain tumor diagnoses quickly. Due to the data complexity of 3D brain images, it is impractical to segment out tumor regions manually, so automatic and reliable methods can be utilized instead of manual work to achieve accurate segmentation of tumor regions. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end, more efficient brain tumor MRI segmentation model, REMU-Net, for the problems of multi-scale feature extraction and difficulty in small target feature extraction in 3D brain tumor image segmentation. Firstly, design and use the multi-channel parallel M-RepVGG module as a decoder to achieve multi-scale feature fusion. Secondly, embedding dilated convolution with different dilated rates in the DM-RepVGG module of the encoder to better extract features at different scales. Finally, introduce the expectation-maximizing attention in the network to better extract the features of the internal details of the tumor. The experimental results on the BraTS2018 validation dataset are Dice scores of 80.93%, 90.13%, and 86.15%, respectively. Experimental results on the BraTS2019 validation dataset can be achieved with Dice scores of 78.29%, 90.65%, and 82.77%, respectively.