Brain tumor detection and segmentation: Interactive framework with a visual interface and feedback facility for dynamically improved accuracy and trust

Abstract

Brain cancers caused by malignant brain tumors are one of the most fatal cancer types with a low survival rate mostly due to the difficulties in early detection. Medical professionals therefore use various invasive and non-invasive methods for detecting and treating brain tumors at the earlier stages thus enabling early treatment. The main non-invasive methods for brain tumor diagnosis and assessment are brain imaging like computed tomography (CT), positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. In this paper, the focus is on detection and segmentation of brain tumors from 2D and 3D brain MRIs. For this purpose, a complete automated system with a web application user interface is described which detects and segments brain tumors with more than 90% accuracy and Dice scores. The user can upload brain MRIs or can access brain images from hospital databases to check presence or absence of brain tumor, to check the existence of brain tumor from brain MRI features and to extract the tumor region precisely from the brain MRI using deep neural networks like CNN, U-Net and U-Net++. The web application also provides an option for entering feedbacks on the results of the detection and segmentation to allow healthcare professionals to add more precise information on the results that can be used to train the model for better future predictions and segmentations.