Multimodal Brain Image Analysis and Survival Prediction Using Neuromorphic Attention-Based Neural Networks.

Accurate analysis of brain tumors from 3D Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is necessary for the diagnosis and treatment planning, and the recent development using deep neural networks becomes of great clinical importance because of its effective and accurate performance. The 3D nature of multimodal MRI demands the large scale memory and computation, while the variety of 3D U-net is widely adopted for medical image segmentation. In this study, 2D U-net is applied to the tumor segmentation and survival period prediction, inspired by the neuromorphic neural network. The new method introduces the neuromorphic saliency map for enhancing the image analysis. By mimicking the visual cortex and implementing the neuromorphic preprocessing, the map of attention and saliency is generated and applied to improve the accurate and fast medical image analysis performance. Through the BraTS 2020 challenge, the performance of the renewed neuromorphic algorithm is evaluated and an overall review is conducted on the previous neuromorphic processing and other approach. The overall survival prediction accuracy is 55.2% for the validation data, and 43% for the test data.