Automatic segmentation of glioblastoma multiform brain tumor in MRI images: Using Deeplabv3+ with pre-trained Resnet18 weights

•The Deep-Net sensitivity in delineation of the enhanced tumor (ET) is more than 90%.•Dice Similarity Coefficient above 67% was achieved for all tumor regions.•The obtained DSC for ET is 78%, which is among the highest scores in the literature.•Combination of Deeplabv3+ and Resnet18 weights can perform well in segmenting the GBM tumor sub-regions. To assess the effectiveness of deep learning algorithms in automated segmentation of magnetic resonance brain images for determining the enhanced tumor, the peri-tumoral edema, the necrotic/ non-enhancing tumor, and Normal tissue volumes. A new deep neural network algorithm, Deep-Net, was developed for semantic segmentation of the glioblastoma tumors in MR images, using the Deeplabv3+ architecture, and the pre-trained Resnet18 initial weights. The MR image Dataset used for training the network was taken from the BraTS 2020 training set, with the ground truth labels for different tumor subregions manually drawn by a group of expert neuroradiologists. In this work, two multi-modal MRI scans, i.e., T1ce and FLAIR of 293 patients with high-grade glioma (HGG), were used for deep network training (Deep-Net). The performance of the network was assessed for different hyper-parameters, to obtain the optimum set of parameters. The similarity scores were used for the evaluation of the optimized network. According to the results of this study, epoch #37 is the optimum epoch giving the best global accuracy (97.53%), and loss function (0.14). The Deep-Net sensitivity in the delineation of the enhanced tumor is more than 90%. The results indicate that the Deep-Net was able to segment GBM tumors with high accuracy.