Brain Tumor Segmentation using UNET and SEGNET: a Comparative Study

Abstract The tumor detection is major challenging task in brain tumor quantitative evaluation. In recent years, owing to non-invasive and strong soft tissue comparison, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has gained great interest. MRI is a commonly used image modality technique to locate brain tumors. An immense amount of data is produced by the MRI. Heterogeneity, isointense and hypointense tumor properties restrict manual segmentation in a fair period of time, thus restricting the use of reliable quantitative measures in clinical practice. In the clinical practice manual segmentation task is quite time consuming and their performance is highly depended on the operator’s experience. Accurate and automated tumor segmentation techniques are also needed; however, the severe spatial and structural heterogeneity of brain tumors makes automatic segmentation a difficult job. This paper proposes fully automatic segmentation of brain tumors using encoder-decoder based convolutional neural networks. The paper focuses on well-known semantic segmentation deep neural networks i.e., UNET and SEGNET for segmenting tumors from Brain MRI images. The networks are trained and tested using freely accessible standard dataset, with Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) as metric for whole predicted image i.e., including tumor and background. UNET’s average DSC on test dataset is 0.76 whereas for SEGNET we got average DSC 0.67. The evaluation of results proves that UNET is having better performance than SEGNET.