Diagnosis Neuro-Oncology Diseases via Artificial Intelligence and Multi-Sequence MRI Methods

The study of brain tumor structure and its type-dependent variations is one of the most important research areas in which medical imaging techniques are used. The structural and statistical analysis of these lesions raises various related problems and projects, such as the detection of the neuro oncology diseases, the shape and the segmentation of specific sub-regions (i.e. necrotic part, (non-)enhanced part, edema), the classification of the tumor occurrence and the subsequent treatment up-prognosis. Almost all of these problems are usually solved numerically, particularly with the tendency to use methods related to artificial intelligence (AI), often including deep learning (DL) networks. One of the most complicated, least researched and challenging tasks in this field is the classification of tumor types. This difficulty can be explained by several reasons, the most important of which is the severe limitation of existing open-source datasets that contain clinically confirmed tumor type designations based on radiological examination protocols. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the most common method for screening, primary detection and non-invasive diagnosis of brain diseases, as well as a source of recommendations for further treatment and observation. In this paper, we extend the previous research works on the robust multi-sequences segmentation and classification methods which allows to consider all available information from MRI scans by the composition of TI, TIC, T2 and T2-FLAIR sequences. It is based on the clinical radiology hypothesis and presents an efficient approach to combining and matching 3D methods to search for areas of comprised the GD-enhancing tumor in order to significantly improve the model's performance of the particular applied numerical problem of brain tumor classification and metastasis segmentation. All investigations performed and results presented are based on the private Siberian brain tumor dataset, including labeled volumetric MRI scans describing a wide variety of tumors and associated clinically relevant ground truth (GT) information.