Informatica

Focusing on the problems of failing to make full use of spatial context information and limited local receptive field when U-Net is utilized to solve MRI brain tumour segmentation, a novel 3D multi-scale attention U-Net method, i.e. MAU-Net, is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a Mixed Depth-wise Convolution (MDConv) module is introduced in the encoder and decoder, which leverages various convolution kernels to extract the multi-scale features of brain tumour images, and effectively strengthens the feature expression of the brain tumour lesion region in the up and down sampling. Secondly, a Context Pyramid Module (CPM) combining multi-scale and attention is embedded in the skip connection position to achieve the combination of local feature enhancement at multi-scale with global feature correlation. Finally, MAU-Net adopts Self-ensemble in the decoding process to achieve complementary detailed features of sampled brain tumour images at different scales, thereby further improving segmentation performance. Ablation and comparison experiment results on the publicly available BraTS 2019/2020 datasets well validate its effectiveness. It respectively achieves the Dice Similarity Coefficients (DSC) of 90.6%/90.2%, 82.7%/82.8%, and 77.9%/78.5% on the whole tumour (WT), tumour core (TC) and enhanced tumour (ET) segmentation. Additionally, on the BraTS 2021 training set, the DSC for WT, TC, and ET reached 93.7%, 93.2%, and 88.9%, respectively.