Brain tissue segmentation using improved kernelized rough-fuzzy C-means with spatio-contextual information from MRI

Machine learning in neuro-oncology: toward novel development fields

PURPOSE

Artificial Intelligence (AI) involves several and different techniques able to elaborate a large amount of data responding to a specific planned outcome. There are several possible applications of this technology in neuro-oncology.

METHODS

We reviewed, according to PRISMA guidelines, available studies adopting AI in different fields of neuro-oncology including neuro-radiology, pathology, surgery, radiation therapy, and systemic treatments.

RESULTS

Neuro-radiology presented the major number of studies assessing AI. However, this technology is being successfully tested also in other operative settings including surgery and radiation therapy. In this context, AI shows to significantly reduce resources and costs maintaining an elevated qualitative standard. Pathological diagnosis and development of novel systemic treatments are other two fields in which AI showed promising preliminary data.

CONCLUSION

It is likely that AI will be quickly included in some aspects of daily clinical practice. Possible applications of these techniques are impressive and cover all aspects of neuro-oncology.

Value of Magnetic Resonance Images and Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy in Diagnosis of Brain Tumors under Fuzzy C-Means Algorithm

This study was aimed to explore the diagnostic value of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) in brain tumors under the fuzzy C-means (FCM) algorithm. The two-dimensional FCM hybrid algorithm was improved to be three-dimensional. The MRI images and MRS spectra of 127 patients with brain tumors (low-grade glioma group) and 54 healthy people (healthy group) were analyzed. The results suggested that the membership matrix of the improved algorithm had lower ambiguity, higher segmentation accuracy, closer relationship of intrapixels, and stronger irrelevance of interclass pixels. Through the analysis of gray matter volume, it was found that, compared with the healthy group, the gray matter and white matter volumes in the brain of high-grade glioma were higher, and those of low-grade glioma group were lower. The improved FCM algorithm could obtain a higher accuracy of 88.64% in segmenting images. It had a higher sensitivity to gray matter changes in brain tumors, reaching 92.72%; its specificity was not much different from that of traditional FCM, which were 83.61% and 88.06%, respectively. In the diagnostic value, the area under the curve of mean kurtosis was the largest, which was 0.962 (P < 0.001). The best critical value was 0.4096, which had a greater reference significance for clinical treatment and prognosis. The ratio of choline/N-acetyl-aspartate and the ratio of choline/creatine also showed significant differences in high- and low-grade gliomas (P < 0.05), but the specificity and sensitivity were slightly lower. It also had guiding significance for the grading of gliomas. Overall, the improved FCM algorithm had obvious advantages in the segmentation process of MRI images, which provided help for the clinical diagnosis of brain tumors.

Whole brain segmentation with full volume neural network

Whole brain segmentation is an important neuroimaging task that segments the whole brain volume into anatomically labeled regions-of-interest. Convolutional neural networks have demonstrated good performance in this task. Existing solutions, usually segment the brain image by classifying the voxels, or labeling the slices or the sub-volumes separately. Their representation learning is based on parts of the whole volume whereas their labeling result is produced by aggregation of partial segmentation. Learning and inference with incomplete information could lead to sub-optimal final segmentation result. To address these issues, we propose to adopt a full volume framework, which feeds the full volume brain image into the segmentation network and directly outputs the segmentation result for the whole brain volume. The framework makes use of complete information in each volume and can be implemented easily. An effective instance in this framework is given subsequently. We adopt the 3D high-resolution network (HRNet) for learning spatially fine-grained representations and the mixed precision training scheme for memory-efficient training. Extensive experiment results on a publicly available 3D MRI brain dataset show that our proposed model advances the state-of-the-art methods in terms of segmentation performance.