3D Multi-Scale Convolutional Networks for Glioma Grading Using MR Images

Paper i proceeding, 2018

This paper addresses issues of grading brain tumor, glioma, from Magnetic Resonance Images (MRIs). Although feature pyramid is shown to be useful to extract multi-scale features for object recognition, it is rarely explored in MRI images for glioma classification/grading. For glioma grading, existing deep learning methods often use convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to extract single-scale features without considering that the scales of brain tumor features vary depending on structure/shape, size, tissue smoothness, and locations. In this paper, we propose to incorporate the multi-scale feature learning into a deep convolutional network architecture, which extracts multi-scale semantic as well as fine features for glioma tumor grading. The main contributions of the paper are: (a) propose a novel 3D multi-scale convolutional network architecture for the dedicated task of glioma grading; (b) propose a novel feature fusion scheme that further refines multi-scale features generated from multi-scale convolutional layers; (c) propose a saliency-aware strategy to enhance tumor regions of MRIs. Experiments were conducted on an open dataset for classifying high/low grade gliomas. Performance on the test set using the proposed scheme has shown good results (with accuracy of 89.47%).