12 Prediction of MRI tumor condition through image segmentation using deep neural network approach

Abstract

Need for medical imaging has immensely increased to diagnose functionality of organs and tissues. Application of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or computerized tomography scan (CT scan) has automated the process of disease prediction which otherwise would need manual intervention of experienced physicians. Critical transplants and tumor diagnosis of kidney, heart and liver could be very challenging without the application of high-resolution medical imaging. Semantic image segmentation helps to identify features within the image and label them to demarcate the background from organs and tumors formed on them. Current proposed model is built by applying image segmentation using deep learning models by training 3D image information obtained from KITS-19 using CNN U-Net architecture to segregate essential tumor details from the kidney background images. Considering the evaluation of medical condition based on imagery is very challenging due to lack of pre-processing methods to handle unbalanced nature of class distribution which is common in medical imaging. In the current research, we apply state-of-the-art convolution neural network and deep learning models to predict the tumor in MRI imagery. We performed evaluation of a subset of 60 CT scans with slice thickness values obtained from KiTS19 dataset. We also compared the image segmentation model with BRATS’2013 challenging dataset also to validate the prediction of tumor in brain MRI scan images. Performance evaluation of kidney and tumor features obtained through threefold cross validation comparing with ground truth gave us dice coefficient score of 0.96 while tumor segmentation prediction was close to 0.80. We believe the performance can be increased through higher GPU memory requirements, which was a limitation to our existing GPU hardware. Nevertheless, the possibility of applying improved deep learning model based on existing results and can be a promising step forward in medical imaging segmentation.