Focus, Segment and Erase: An Efficient Network for Multi-label Brain Tumor Segmentation

Xuan Chen, JunHao Liew, Wei Xiong, Chee-Kong Chui, Sim Heng Ong

Abstract: In multi-label brain tumor segmentation, class imbalance and inter-class interference are common and challenging problems. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end trainable network named FSENet to address the aforementioned issues. The proposed FSENet has a tumor region pooling component to restrict the prediction within the tumor region (“focus”), thus mitigating the influence of the dominant non-tumor region. Furthermore, the network decomposes the more challenging multi-label brain tumor segmentation problem into several simpler binary segmentation tasks (“segment”), where each task focuses on a specific tumor tissue. To alleviate inter-class interference, we adopt a simple yet effective idea in our work: we erase the segmented regions before proceeding to further segmentation of tumor tissue (“erase”), thus reduces competition among different tumor classes. Our single-model FSENet ranks $$3^{rd}$$ on the multi-modal brain tumor segmentation benchmark 2015 (BraTS 2015) without relying on ensembles or complicated post-processing steps.