Improving 3D Brain Tumor Segmentation With Predict-Refine Mechanism Using Saliency And Feature Maps

This paper demonstrates the use of 3D Anisotropic Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with predict-refine mechanism for 3D brain tumor segmentation. We propose two networks that utilize multi-scale feedback and saliency maps respectively to segment three critical regions involved in automated brain tumor segmentation. The proposed networks are formulated to predict feature maps at different resolutions during the prediction phase. These networks perform refinement process using the saliency or feature maps as feedback information for the refinement process. The recurrent architecture allows the network to automatically rectify errors in saliency map of the previous prediction phase resulting in more reliable final predictions. Our experimental results on the BraTS2017 dataset demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed predict-refine architecture than current state of the art approaches improving results by up to 8% without any additional increase in the 1.9M model parameters.