Brain Tumor Segmentation and Survival Prediction using 3D Attention UNet
This work addresses brain tumor analysis for medical imaging, but it is incremental as it builds on existing UNet and attention mechanisms with standard feature extraction.
The authors tackled brain tumor segmentation from MRI and survival prediction by developing a 3D Attention UNet for segmentation and using radiomic and clinical features for prediction, finding that features like necrosis shape and age are critical for estimating overall survival.
In this work, we develop an attention convolutional neural network (CNN) to segment brain tumors from Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI). Further, we predict the survival rate using various machine learning methods. We adopt a 3D UNet architecture and integrate channel and spatial attention with the decoder network to perform segmentation. For survival prediction, we extract some novel radiomic features based on geometry, location, the shape of the segmented tumor and combine them with clinical information to estimate the survival duration for each patient. We also perform extensive experiments to show the effect of each feature for overall survival (OS) prediction. The experimental results infer that radiomic features such as histogram, location, and shape of the necrosis region and clinical features like age are the most critical parameters to estimate the OS.