Uncertainty quantification and attention-aware fusion guided multi-modal MR brain tumor segmentation

Brain tumor is one of the most aggressive cancers in the world, accurate brain tumor segmentation plays a critical role in clinical diagnosis and treatment planning. Although deep learning models have presented remarkable success in medical segmentation, they can only obtain the segmentation map without capturing the segmentation uncertainty. To achieve accurate and safe clinical results, it is necessary to produce extra uncertainty maps to assist the subsequent segmentation revision. To this end, we propose to exploit the uncertainty quantification in the deep learning model and apply it to multi-modal brain tumor segmentation. In addition, we develop an effective attention-aware multi-modal fusion method to learn the complimentary feature information from the multiple MR modalities. First, a multi-encoder-based 3D U-Net is proposed to obtain the initial segmentation results. Then, an estimated Bayesian model is presented to measure the uncertainty of the initial segmentation results. Finally, the obtained uncertainty maps are integrated into a deep learning-based segmentation network, serving as an additional constraint information to further refine the segmentation results. The proposed network is evaluated on publicly available BraTS 2018 and BraTS 2019 datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods on Dice score, Hausdorff distance and Sensitivity metrics. Furthermore, the proposed components could be easily applied to other network architectures and other computer vision fields.