RFNet: Region-aware Fusion Network for Incomplete Multi-modal Brain Tumor Segmentation

Most existing brain tumor segmentation methods usually exploit multi-modal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images to achieve high segmentation performance. However, the problem of missing certain modality images often happens in clinical practice, thus leading to severe segmentation performance degradation. In this work, we propose a Region-aware Fusion Network (RFNet) that is able to exploit different combinations of multi-modal data adaptively and effectively for tumor segmentation. Considering different modalities are sensitive to different brain tumor regions, we design a Region-aware Fusion Module (RFM) in RFNet to conduct modal feature fusion from available image modalities according to disparate regions. Benefiting from RFM, RFNet can adaptively segment tumor regions from an incomplete set of multi-modal images by effectively aggregating modal features. Furthermore, we also develop a segmentation-based regularizer to prevent RFNet from the insufficient and unbalanced training caused by the incomplete multi-modal data. Specifically, apart from obtaining segmentation results from fused modal features, we also segment each image modality individually from the corresponding encoded features. In this manner, each modal encoder is forced to learn discriminative features, thus improving the representation ability of the fused features. Remarkably, extensive experiments on BRATS2020, BRATS2018 and BRATS2015 datasets demonstrate that our RFNet outperforms the state-of-the-art significantly.