ERU-Net: A novel effective 2D residual neural network for brain tumors semantic segmentation from multimodal MRI

Abstract

Brain tumor segmentation technology is crucial in diagnosing and treating MRI brain tumors. It aids doctors in locating and measuring tumors. It also plays a vital role in the planning and development of treatment and rehabilitation strategies. Recently, challenges have persisted despite the success achieved by deep learning-based methods in improving the segmentation accuracy of MRI brain tumor regions. These challenges are particularly prominent in small-scale tumor regions, where issues arise due to their diminutive size and the substantial variation between regions occupied by different tumor classes. Additionally, limitations in parameters and computational complexity contribute to these challenges. Thus, there remains considerable potential for enhancing these methods and increasing their efficacy. This paper presents an effective 2D residual neural network (2D ERU-Net) for segmenting MRI brain tumors. The proposed architecture consists of residual units in the encoder path to speed up training and convergence, and a deep supervision module (DSM) in the decoder path to address gradient-related issues and obtain high-resolution feature maps. Furthermore, a fusion weighted loss function, incorporating both weighted dice loss and weighted cross-entropy loss, is developed to solve the issues related to network convergence and data imbalance. The results of experiments on the reliable MRI brain tumor BraTS2019 dataset showed that the ERU-Net achieved a mean dice coefficient of 0.881, 0.882, and 0.891 and Hausdorff distances of 20.86 mm, 17.83 mm, and 13.35 mm for the tumor core, enhancing tumor, and whole tumor, respectively. Furthermore, ERU-Net demonstrates exceptional efficiency when compared to state-of-the-art methods.