State-of-the-art techniques using pre-operative brain MRI scans for survival prediction of glioblastoma multiforme patients and future research directions

OBJECTIVE: Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is a grade IV brain tumour with very low life expectancy. Physicians and oncologists urgently require automated techniques in clinics for brain tumour segmentation (BTS) and survival prediction (SP) of GBM patients to perform precise surgery followed by chemotherapy treatment. METHODS: This study aims at examining the recent methodologies developed using automated learning and radiomics to automate the process of SP. Automated techniques use pre-operative raw magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans and clinical data related to GBM patients. All SP methods submitted for the multimodal brain tumour segmentation (BraTS) challenge are examined to extract the generic workflow for SP. RESULTS: The maximum accuracies achieved by 21 state-of-the-art different SP techniques reviewed in this study are 65.5 and 61.7% using the validation and testing subsets of the BraTS dataset, respectively. The comparisons based on segmentation architectures, SP models, training parameters and hardware configurations have been made. CONCLUSION: The limited accuracies achieved in the literature led us to review the various automated methodologies and evaluation metrics to find out the research gaps and other findings related to the survival prognosis of GBM patients so that these accuracies can be improved in future. Finally, the paper provides the most promising future research directions to improve the performance of automated SP techniques and increase their clinical relevance.