Aggregation-and-Attention Network for brain tumor segmentation

BACKGROUND: Glioma is a malignant brain tumor; its location is complex and is difficult to remove surgically. To diagnosis the brain tumor, doctors can precisely diagnose and localize the disease using medical images. However, the computer-assisted diagnosis for the brain tumor diagnosis is still the problem because the rough segmentation of the brain tumor makes the internal grade of the tumor incorrect. METHODS: In this paper, we proposed an Aggregation-and-Attention Network for brain tumor segmentation. The proposed network takes the U-Net as the backbone, aggregates multi-scale semantic information, and focuses on crucial information to perform brain tumor segmentation. To this end, we proposed an enhanced down-sampling module and Up-Sampling Layer to compensate for the information loss. The multi-scale connection module is to construct the multi-receptive semantic fusion between encoder and decoder. Furthermore, we designed a dual-attention fusion module that can extract and enhance the spatial relationship of magnetic resonance imaging and applied the strategy of deep supervision in different parts of the proposed network. RESULTS: Experimental results show that the performance of the proposed framework is the best on the BraTS2020 dataset, compared with the-state-of-art networks. The performance of the proposed framework surpasses all the comparison networks, and its average accuracies of the four indexes are 0.860, 0.885, 0.932, and 1.2325, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: The framework and modules of the proposed framework are scientific and practical, which can extract and aggregate useful semantic information and enhance the ability of glioma segmentation.