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Accurate brain extraction on MRI using U-Net trained in two stages

Published: 08 August 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Brain extraction is an essential processing step for most brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies. Due to the inaccuracy of available labels in training dataset, existing methods based on U-Net can only obtain rough brains. In this paper, we propose a new deep-learning-based method for accurate 3D brain extraction, in which a U-Net model is trained in two stages using different loss functions. In the first stage, the binary cross entropy (BCE) loss is used to train the model with original head MRIs and coarse labelled brain masks as usual U-Net models. In the second stage, a composite loss function that integrates active contour model (ACM) and BCE loss is introduced to guide the further training. By this means, the final trained model can not only strip head scalp and skull from head MRI scans, but also remove cerebrospinal fluid around brain tissues. Both quantitative and qualitative test results show that our brain extraction is more accurate than other counterparts. The improvement enables to build better brain model with more details.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ICBBT '22: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedical Technology
May 2022
190 pages
ISBN:9781450396387
DOI:10.1145/3543377
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 08 August 2022

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Author Tags

  1. Active Contour Model
  2. Brain Extraction
  3. Convolutional Neural Network
  4. Deep Learning
  5. MRI
  6. U-Net

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