In this work, we propose a novel cascaded V-Nets method to segment brain tumor substructures in multimodal brain magnetic resonance imaging. Although V-Net has been successfully used in many segmentation tasks, we demonstrate that its performance could be further enhanced by using a cascaded structure and ensemble strategy. Briefly, our baseline V-Net consists of four levels with encoding and decoding paths and intra- and inter-path skip connections. Focal loss is chosen to improve performance on hard samples as well as balance the positive and negative samples. We further propose three preprocessing pipelines for multimodal magnetic resonance images to train different models. By ensembling the segmentation probability maps obtained from these models, segmentation result is further improved. In other hand, we propose to segment the whole tumor first, and then divide it into tumor necrosis, edema, and enhancing tumor. Experimental results on BraTS 2018 online validation set achieve average Dice scores of 0.9048, 0.8364, and 0.7748 for whole tumor, tumor core and enhancing tumor, respectively. The corresponding values for BraTS 2018 online testing set are 0.8761, 0.7953, and 0.7364, respectively. We also evaluate the proposed method in two additional data sets from local hospitals comprising of 28 and 28 subjects, and the best results are 0.8635, 0.8036, and 0.7217, respectively. We further make a prediction of patient overall survival by ensembling multiple classifiers for long, mid and short groups, and achieve accuracy of 0.519, mean square error of 367240 and Spearman correlation coefficient of 0.168 for BraTS 2018 online testing set.
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Dr. David Lowemann, M.Sc, Ph.D., is a co-founder of the Institute for the Future of Human Potential, where he leads the charge in pioneering Self-Enhancement Science for the Success of Society. With a keen interest in exploring the untapped potential of the human mind, Dr. Lowemann has dedicated his career to pushing the boundaries of human capabilities and understanding.
Armed with a Master of Science degree and a Ph.D. in his field, Dr. Lowemann has consistently been at the forefront of research and innovation, delving into ways to optimize human performance, cognition, and overall well-being. His work at the Institute revolves around a profound commitment to harnessing cutting-edge science and technology to help individuals lead more fulfilling and intelligent lives.
Dr. Lowemann’s influence extends to the educational platform BetterSmarter.me, where he shares his insights, findings, and personal development strategies with a broader audience. His ongoing mission is shaping the way we perceive and leverage the vast capacities of the human mind, offering invaluable contributions to society’s overall success and collective well-being.