Brain Tumor Segmentation Using Multi-Cascaded Convolutional Neural Networks and Conditional Random Field

Accurate segmentation of brain tumor is an indispensable component for cancer diagnosis and treatment. In this paper, we propose a novel brain tumor segmentation method based on multi-cascaded convolutional neural network (MCCNN) and fully connected conditional random fields (CRFs). The segmentation process mainly includes the following two steps. First, we design a multi-cascaded network architecture by combining the intermediate results of several connected components to take the local dependencies of labels into account and make use of multi-scale features for the coarse segmentation. Second, we apply CRFs to consider the spatial contextual information and eliminate some spurious outputs for the fine segmentation. In addition, we use image patches obtained from axial, coronal, and sagittal views to respectively train three segmentation models, and then combine them to obtain the final segmentation result. The validity of the proposed method is evaluated on three publicly available databases. The experimental results show that our method achieves competitive performance compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.