Extending nn-UNet for brain tumor segmentation
This work addresses brain tumor segmentation for medical diagnosis, but it is incremental as it builds directly on the previous winning method.
The authors tackled brain tumor segmentation by extending the nn-UNet model with modifications like larger networks and axial attention, achieving first place in the 2021 competition with minor quantitative improvements over the baseline.
Brain tumor segmentation is essential for the diagnosis and prognosis of patients with gliomas. The brain tumor segmentation challenge has continued to provide a great source of data to develop automatic algorithms to perform the task. This paper describes our contribution to the 2021 competition. We developed our methods based on nn-UNet, the winning entry of last year competition. We experimented with several modifications, including using a larger network, replacing batch normalization with group normalization, and utilizing axial attention in the decoder. Internal 5-fold cross validation as well as online evaluation from the organizers showed the effectiveness of our approach, with minor improvement in quantitative metrics when compared to the baseline. The proposed models won first place in the final ranking on unseen test data. The codes, pretrained weights, and docker image for the winning submission are publicly available at https://github.com/rixez/Brats21_KAIST_MRI_Lab