Multi-task Model for Glioma Segmentation and Isocitrate Dehydrogenase Status Prediction Using Global and Local Features

According to the 2021 World Health Organization IDH status prediction scheme for gliomas, isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH) is a particularly important basis for glioma diagnosis. In general, 3D multimodal brain MRI is an effective diagnostic tool. However, only using brain MRI data is difficult for experienced doctors to predict the IDH status. Surgery is necessary to be performed for confirming the IDH. Previous studies have shown that brain MRI images of glioma areas contain a lot of useful information for diagnosis. These studies usually need to mark the glioma area in advance to complete the prediction of IDH status, which takes a long time and has high computational cost. The tumor segmentation task model can automatically segment and locate the tumor region, which is exactly the information needed for the IDH prediction task. In this study, we proposed a multi-task deep learning model using 3D multimodal brain MRI images to achieve glioma segmentation and IDH status prediction simultaneously, which improved the accuracy of both tasks effectively. Firstly, we used a segmentation model to segment the tumor region. Also, the whole MRI image and the segmented glioma region features as the global and local features were used to predict IDH status. The effectiveness of the proposed method was validated via a public glioma dataset from the BraTS2020. Our experimental results show that our proposed method outperformed state-of-the-art methods with a prediction accuracy of 88.5% and average dice of 79.8%. The improvements in prediction and segmentation are 3% and 1% compared with the state-of-the-art method, respectively.