Brain Tumour Segmentation and Classification using Convolutional Neural Network in MRI images

Abstract

In brain tumors, gliomas are the most common and aggressive, leading to a very short life expectancy in their highest grade. Thus, treatment planning is a key stage to improve the quality of life of oncological patients. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a widely used imaging technique to assess these tumors, but the large amount of data produced by MRI prevents manual segmentation in a reasonable time, limiting the use of precise quantitative measurements in the clinical practice. So, automatic and reliable segmentation methods are required; however, the large spatial and structural variability among brain tumors make automatic segmentation a challenging problem. Here we propose an automatic segmentation method based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), exploring small 33 kernels. The use of small kernels allows designing a deeper architecture, besides having a positive effect against over fitting, given the fewer number of weights in the network. We also investigated the use of intensity normalization as a pre-processing step, which though not common in CNN-based segmentation methods, proved together with data augmentation to be very effective for brain tumor segmentation in MRI images. We also try to find out the area of the tumor effected potion in the input image. There are mainly three stages includes. The first stage is pre-processing, second stage is classification via deep neural network and the final stage is the post-processing .