An efficient brain tumor segmentation model based on group normalization and 3D U‐Net

Abstract Accurate segmentation of brain tumors has a vital impact on clinical diagnosis and treatment, and good segmentation results are helpful for the treatment of this disease, which is a serious threat to human health. High‐precision segmentation of brain tumors remains a challenging task due to their diverse shapes, sizes, locations, and complex boundaries. Considering the special structure of medical brain tumor images, many researchers have proposed a brain tumor segmentation (BraTS) network based on 3D U‐Net. However, there are also problems such as insufficient receptive fields and excessive computing costs. In this paper, we propose an efficient BraTS model based on group normalization (GN) and 3D U‐Net (3D‐EffUNet). First, according to the characteristics of brain tumor images, the medical image of the whole case is input into the model, and 3D convolution layers are used to extract features and filter irrelevant information. Then, using 3D U‐Net as the main framework, an efficient convolutional module is designed for more precise processing of brain tumor features. Moreover, an efficient convolution module based on GN and an attention mechanism is introduced to reduce the complexity of the network without affecting the segmentation performance and to increase the awareness of voxels between adjacent dimensions and the local space. Finally, the decoder was used to reconstruct high‐precision BraTS information. The model is trained and tested on the BraTS2021 dataset, and the experimental results show that it can maintain good segmentation performance and greatly reduce the calculation cost.