Global–Local Feature Fusion Network Based on Nonlinear Spiking Neural Convolutional Model for MRI Brain Tumor Segmentation

Due to the differences in size, shape, and location of brain tumors, brain tumor segmentation differs greatly from that of other organs. The purpose of brain tumor segmentation is to accurately locate and segment tumors from MRI images to assist doctors in diagnosis, treatment planning and surgical navigation. NSNP-like convolutional model is a new neural-like convolutional model inspired by nonlinear spiking mechanism of nonlinear spiking neural P (NSNP) systems. Therefore, this paper proposes a global-local feature fusion network based on NSNP-like convolutional model for MRI brain tumor segmentation. To this end, we have designed three characteristic modules that take full advantage of the NSNP-like convolution model: dilated SNP module (DSNP), multi-path dilated SNP pooling module (MDSP) and Poolformer module. The DSNP and MDSP modules are employed to construct the encoders. These modules help address the issue of feature loss and enable the fusion of more high-level features. On the other hand, the Poolformer module is used in the decoder. It processes features that contain global context information and facilitates the interaction between local and global features. In addition, channel spatial attention (CSA) module is designed at the skip connection between encoder and decoder to establish the long-range dependence between the same layers, thereby enhancing the relationship between channels and making the model have global modeling capabilities. In the experiments, our model achieves Dice coefficients of 85.71[Formula: see text], 92.32[Formula: see text], 87.75[Formula: see text] for ET, WT, and TC, respectively, on the N-BraTS2021 dataset. Moreover, our model achieves Dice coefficients of 83.91[Formula: see text], 91.96[Formula: see text], 90.14[Formula: see text] and 85.05[Formula: see text], 92.30[Formula: see text], 90.31[Formula: see text] on the BraTS2018 and BraTS2019 datasets respectively. Experimental results also indicate that our model not only achieves good brain tumor segmentation performance, but also has good generalization ability. The code is already available on GitHub: https://github.com/Li-JJ-1/NSNP-brain-tumor-segmentation.