A mix-pooling CNN architecture with FCRF for brain tumor segmentation

Abstract MR technique is prevalent for doctor to diagnose and assess glioblastomas which are the most lethal form of brain tumors. Although Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) has been applied in automatic brain tumor segmentation and is proved useful and efficient, traditional one-pathway CNN architecture with convolutional layers and max pooling layers has limited receptive fields representing the local context information. Such mindset in traditional CNN may dismiss useful global context information. In this paper, we design a two-pathway model with average and max pooling layers in different paths. Besides, 1 × 1 kernels are followed input layers to add the non-linearity dimensions of input data. Finally, we combine the CNN architecture with fully connected CRF(FCRF) as a mixture model to introduce the global context information to optimize prediction results. Our experiments proved that the mixture model improved segmentation and labeling accuracy.