Multi-scale U-SegNet architecture with cascaded dilated convolutions for brain MRI Segmentation

Automatic segmentation of brain tissues such as WM, GM, and CSF from brain MRI scans is helpful for the diagnosis of many neurological disorders. Accurate segmentation of these brain structures is a very challenging task due to low tissue contrast, bias filed, and partial volume effects. With the aim to improve brain MRI segmentation accuracy, we propose an end-to-end convolutional based U-SegNet architecture designed with multi-scale kernels, which includes cascaded dilated convolutions for the task of brain MRI segmentation. The multi-scale convolution kernels are designed to extract abundant semantic features and capture context information at different scales. Further, the cascaded dilated convolution scheme helps to alleviate the vanishing gradient problem in the proposed model. Experimental outcomes indicate that the proposed architecture is superior to the traditional deep-learning methods such as Segnet, U-net, and U-Segnet and achieves high performance with an average DSC of 93% and 86% of JI value for brain MRI segmentation.