  A cascade of fully convolutional neural networks is proposed to segment
multi-modal Magnetic Resonance (MR) images with brain tumor into background and
three hierarchical regions: whole tumor, tumor core and enhancing tumor core.
The cascade is designed to decompose the multi-class segmentation problem into
a sequence of three binary segmentation problems according to the subregion
hierarchy. The whole tumor is segmented in the first step and the bounding box
of the result is used for the tumor core segmentation in the second step. The
enhancing tumor core is then segmented based on the bounding box of the tumor
core segmentation result. Our networks consist of multiple layers of
anisotropic and dilated convolution filters, and they are combined with
multi-view fusion to reduce false positives. Residual connections and
multi-scale predictions are employed in these networks to boost the
segmentation performance. Experiments with BraTS 2017 validation set show that
the proposed method achieved average Dice scores of 0.7859, 0.9050, 0.8378 for
enhancing tumor core, whole tumor and tumor core, respectively. The
corresponding values for BraTS 2017 testing set were 0.7831, 0.8739, and
0.7748, respectively.
