2020/06/04 by Sara Ranjbar, Ranjbar, Sara, Kyle Singleton +13
Computer Science · Medicine · Neuroscience · #Advanced MRI Techniques and Applications #Advanced Neural Network Applications #Brain Tumor Detection and Classification #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Image and Video Processing (eess.IV) #Quantitative Methods (q-bio.QM) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2006.02627
openalex publication_date 2020/06/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Whole brain extraction, also known as skull stripping, is a process in neuroimaging in which non-brain tissue such as skull, eyeballs, skin, etc. are removed from neuroimages. Skull striping is a preliminary step in presurgical planning, cortical reconstruction, and automatic tumor segmentation. Despite a plethora of skull stripping approaches in the literature, few are sufficiently accurate for processing pathology-presenting MRIs, especially MRIs with brain tumors. In this work we propose a deep learning approach for skull striping common MRI sequences in oncology such as T1-weighted with gadolinium contrast (T1Gd) and T2-weighted fluid attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) in patients with brain tumors. We automatically created gray matter, white matter, and CSF probability masks using SPM12 software and merged the masks into one for a final whole-brain mask for model training. Dice agreement, sensitivity, and specificity of the model (referred herein as DeepBrain) was tested against manual brain masks. To assess data efficiency, we retrained our models using progressively fewer training data examples and calculated average dice scores on the test set for the models trained in each round. Further, we tested our model against MRI of healthy brains from the LBP40A dataset. Overall, DeepBrain yielded an average dice score of 94.5%, sensitivity of 96.4%, and specificity of 98.5% on brain tumor data. For healthy brains, model performance improved to a dice score of 96.2%, sensitivity of 96.6% and specificity of 99.2%. The data efficiency experiment showed that, for this specific task, comparable levels of accuracy could have been achieved with as few as 50 training samples. In conclusion, this study demonstrated that a deep learning model trained on minimally processed automatically-generated labels can generate more accurate brain masks on MRI of brain tumor patients within seconds.