Deep Learning-Based Multiclass Brain Tissue Segmentation in Fetal MRIs

Fetal brain tissue segmentation is essential for quantifying the presence of congenital disorders in the developing fetus. Manual segmentation of fetal brain tissue is cumbersome and time-consuming, so using an automatic segmentation method can greatly simplify the process. In addition, the fetal brain undergoes a variety of changes throughout pregnancy, such as increased brain volume, neuronal migration, and synaptogenesis. In this case, the contrast between tissues, especially between gray matter and white matter, constantly changes throughout pregnancy, increasing the complexity and difficulty of our segmentation. To reduce the burden of manual refinement of segmentation, we proposed a new deep learning-based segmentation method. Our approach utilized a novel attentional structural block, the contextual transformer block (CoT-Block), which was applied in the backbone network model of the encoder–decoder to guide the learning of dynamic attentional matrices and enhance image feature extraction. Additionally, in the last layer of the decoder, we introduced a hybrid dilated convolution module, which can expand the receptive field and retain detailed spatial information, effectively extracting the global contextual information in fetal brain MRI. We quantitatively evaluated our method according to several performance measures: dice, precision, sensitivity, and specificity. In 80 fetal brain MRI scans with gestational ages ranging from 20 to 35 weeks, we obtained an average Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 83.79%, an average Volume Similarity (VS) of 84.84%, and an average Hausdorff95 Distance (HD95) of 35.66 mm. We also used several advanced deep learning segmentation models for comparison under equivalent conditions, and the results showed that our method was superior to other methods and exhibited an excellent segmentation performance.