  Recent advances in machine learning and prevalence of digital medical images
have opened up an opportunity to address the challenging brain tumor
segmentation (BTS) task by using deep convolutional neural networks. However,
different from the RGB image data that are very widespread, the medical image
data used in brain tumor segmentation are relatively scarce in terms of the
data scale but contain the richer information in terms of the modality
property. To this end, this paper proposes a novel cross-modality deep feature
learning framework to segment brain tumors from the multi-modality MRI data.
The core idea is to mine rich patterns across the multi-modality data to make
up for the insufficient data scale. The proposed cross-modality deep feature
learning framework consists of two learning processes: the cross-modality
feature transition (CMFT) process and the cross-modality feature fusion (CMFF)
process, which aims at learning rich feature representations by transiting
knowledge across different modality data and fusing knowledge from different
modality data, respectively. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on the
BraTS benchmarks, which show that the proposed cross-modality deep feature
learning framework can effectively improve the brain tumor segmentation
performance when compared with the baseline methods and state-of-the-art
methods.
