Brain tumor segmentation using deep learning: A Review
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54097/31ag9n29Keywords:
Brain tumor segmentation, Deep learning, Transformer, CNN, GNN, MambaAbstract
Brain tumor segmentation is a crucial task in medical image analysis, as accurate delineation of tumor regions is vital for clinical diagnosis, treatment planning, and prognosis assessment. Traditional Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based models have demonstrated significant success in capturing local features, but they face challenges in modeling global context, which is essential for complex segmentation tasks. This review examines recent advancements in brain tumor segmentation, with a focus on CNNs, Transformers, Mamba, and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), as well as their hybrid models. This review critically evaluates the strengths and limitations of each approach with respect to architecture, segmentation accuracy, and real-world applicability. Additionally, it addresses key challenges such as computational complexity and data scarcity, and proposes future research directions to enhance the practical use of these methods in clinical settings.
Downloads
References
[1] Wang R, Lei T, Cui R, et al. Medical image segmentation using deep learning: A survey[J]. IET image processing, 2022, 16(5): 1243-1267.
[2] Jha D, Riegler M A, Johansen D, et al. Doubleu-net: A deep convolutional neural network for medical image segmentation[C]//2020 IEEE 33rd International symposium on computer-based medical systems (CBMS). IEEE, 2020: 558-564.
[3] Graham S, Vu Q D, Raza S E A, et al. Hover-net: Simultaneous segmentation and classification of nuclei in multi-tissue histology images[J]. Medical image analysis, 2019, 58: 101563.
[4] Pichaivel M, Anbumani G, Theivendren P, et al. An overview of brain tumor[J]. Brain Tumors, 2022, 1: 1-10.
[5] Nabors L B, Portnow J, Ahluwalia M, et al. Central nervous system cancers, version 3.2020, NCCN clinical practice guidelines in oncology[J]. Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, 2020, 18(11): 1537-1570.
[6] Fangusaro J. Pediatric high grade glioma: a review and update on tumor clinical characteristics and biology[J]. Frontiers in oncology, 2012, 2: 105.
[7] Nadeem M W, Ghamdi M A A, Hussain M, et al. Brain tumor analysis empowered with deep learning: A review, taxonomy, and future challenges[J]. Brain sciences, 2020, 10(2): 118.
[8] Maqsood S, Damaševičius R, Maskeliūnas R. Multi-modal brain tumor detection using deep neural network and multiclass SVM[J]. Medicina, 2022, 58(8): 1090.
[9] Ranjbarzadeh R, Zarbakhsh P, Caputo A, et al. Brain tumor segmentation based on optimized convolutional neural network and improved chimp optimization algorithm[J]. Computers in Biology and Medicine, 2024, 168: 107723.
[10] Rasool N, Bhat J I. A Critical Review on Segmentation of Glioma Brain Tumor and Prediction of Overall Survival[J]. Archives of Computational Methods in Engineering, 2024: 1-45.
[11] LeCun Y, Bottou L, Bengio Y, et al. Gradient-based learning applied to document recognition[J]. Proceedings of the IEEE, 1998, 86(11): 2278-2324.
[12] Krizhevsky A, Sutskever I, Hinton G E. Imagenet classification with deep convolutional neural networks[J]. Advances in neural information processing systems, 2012, 25.
[13] Simonyan K. Very deep convolutional networks for large-scale image recognition[J]. arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.1556, 2014.
[14] He K, Zhang X, Ren S, et al. Deep residual learning for image recognition[C]//Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition. 2016: 770-778.
[15] Long J, Shelhamer E, Darrell T. Fully convolutional networks for semantic segmentation[C]//Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition. 2015: 3431-3440.
[16] Ronneberger O, Fischer P, Brox T. U-net: Convolutional networks for biomedical image segmentation[C]//Medical image computing and computer-assisted intervention–MICCAI 2015: 18th international conference, Munich, Germany, October 5-9, 2015, proceedings, part III 18. Springer International Publishing, 2015: 234-241.
[17] Dosovitskiy A. An image is worth 16x16 words: Transformers for image recognition at scale[J]. arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.11929, 2020.
[18] Scarselli F, Gori M, Tsoi A C, et al. The graph neural network model[J]. IEEE transactions on neural networks, 2008, 20(1): 61-80.
[19] Gu A, Dao T. Mamba: Linear-time sequence modeling with selective state spaces[J]. arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.00752, 2023.
[20] Gu A, Goel K, Ré C. Efficiently modeling long sequences with structured state spaces[J]. arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.00396, 2021.
[21] Menze B H, Jakab A, Bauer S, et al. The multimodal brain tumor image segmentation benchmark (BRATS)[J]. IEEE transactions on medical imaging, 2014, 34(10): 1993-2024.
[22] Bakas S, Akbari H, Sotiras A, et al. Advancing the cancer genome atlas glioma MRI collections with expert segmentation labels and radiomic features[J]. Scientific data, 2017, 4(1): 1-13.
[23] Bakas S, Reyes M, Jakab A, et al. Identifying the best machine learning algorithms for brain tumor segmentation, progression assessment, and overall survival prediction in the BRATS challenge[J]. arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.02629, 2018.
[24] Çiçek Ö, Abdulkadir A, Lienkamp S S, et al. 3D U-Net: learning dense volumetric segmentation from sparse annotation[C]//Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention–MICCAI 2016: 19th International Conference, Athens, Greece, October 17-21, 2016, Proceedings, Part II 19. Springer International Publishing, 2016: 424-432.
[25] Milletari F, Navab N, Ahmadi S A. V-net: Fully convolutional neural networks for volumetric medical image segmentation[C]//2016 fourth international conference on 3D vision (3DV). Ieee, 2016: 565-571.
[26] Myronenko A, Siddiquee M M R, Yang D, et al. Automated head and neck tumor segmentation from 3D PET/CT HECKTOR 2022 challenge report[M]//3D Head and Neck Tumor Segmentation in PET/CT Challenge. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2022: 31-37.
[27] Heidari M, Kazerouni A, Soltany M, et al. Hiformer: Hierarchical multi-scale representations using transformers for medical image segmentation[C]//Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF winter conference on applications of computer vision. 2023: 6202-6212.
[28] Isensee F, Jaeger P F, Kohl S A A, et al. nnU-Net: a self-configuring method for deep learning-based biomedical image segmentation[J]. Nature methods, 2021, 18(2): 203-211.
[29] Cao H, Wang Y, Chen J, et al. Swin-unet: Unet-like pure transformer for medical image segmentation[C]//European conference on computer vision. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2022: 205-218.
[30] Liu Z, Lin Y, Cao Y, et al. Swin transformer: Hierarchical vision transformer using shifted windows[C]//Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF international conference on computer vision. 2021: 10012-10022.
[31] Ruan J, Xiang S. Vm-unet: Vision mamba unet for medical image segmentation[J]. arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.02491, 2024.
[32] Wang Z, Zheng J Q, Zhang Y, et al. Mamba-unet: Unet-like pure visual mamba for medical image segmentation[J]. arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.05079, 2024.
[33] Perera S, Navard P, Yilmaz A. SegFormer3D: an Efficient Transformer for 3D Medical Image Segmentation[C]//Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. 2024: 4981-4988.
[34] Zhou L, Jiang Y, Li W, et al. Shape-Scale Co-Awareness Network for 3D Brain Tumor Segmentation[J]. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 2024.
[35] Wenxuan W, Chen C, Meng D, et al. Transbts: Multimodal brain tumor segmentation using transformer[C]//International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, Springer. 2021: 109-119.
[36] Xing Z, Yu L, Wan L, et al. NestedFormer: Nested modality-aware transformer for brain tumor segmentation[C]//International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2022: 140-150.
[37] Hatamizadeh A, Tang Y, Nath V, et al. Unetr: Transformers for 3d medical image segmentation[C]//Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF winter conference on applications of computer vision. 2022: 574-584.
[38] Shaker A M, Maaz M, Rasheed H, et al. UNETR++: delving into efficient and accurate 3D medical image segmentation[J]. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 2024.
[39] Ma Q, Zhou S, Li C, et al. DGRUnit: Dual graph reasoning unit for brain tumor segmentation[J]. Computers in Biology and Medicine, 2022, 149: 106079.
[40] Zhou T. M2GCNet: Multi-Modal Graph Convolution Network for Precise Brain Tumor Segmentation Across Multiple MRI Sequences[J]. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 2024.
[41] Xu J. HC-Mamba: Vision MAMBA with Hybrid Convolutional Techniques for Medical Image Segmentation[J]. arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.05007, 2024.
[42] Wang J, Chen J, Chen D, et al. LKM-UNet: Large kernel vision mamba unet for medical image segmentation[C]//International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2024: 360-370.
[43] Wang J, Chen J, Chen D, et al. Large window-based mamba unet for medical image segmentation: Beyond convolution and self-attention[J]. arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.07332, 2024.
[44] Liao W, Zhu Y, Wang X, et al. Lightm-unet: Mamba assists in lightweight unet for medical image segmentation[J]. arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.05246, 2024.
[45] Wu Q, Zhao W, Yang C, et al. Simplifying and empowering transformers for large-graph representations[J]. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2024, 36.
[46] Hatamizadeh A, Kautz J. Mambavision: A hybrid mamba-transformer vision backbone[J]. arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.08083, 2024.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Journal of Computing and Electronic Information Management

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.