Description

Among brain tumors, gliomas are the most common and aggressive, leading to a very short life expectancy in their highest grade. Thus, treatment planning is a key stage to improve the quality of life of oncological patients. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a widely used imaging technique to assess these tumors, but the large amount of data produced by MRI prevents manual segmentation in a reasonable time, limiting the use of precise quantitative measurements in the clinical practice. So, automatic and reliable segmentation methods are required; however, the large spatial and structural variability among brain tumors make automatic segmentation a challenging problem. Here, we propose an automatic segmentation method based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), exploring small 3*3 kernels. The use of small kernels allows designing a deeper architecture, besides having a positive effect against over fitting, given the fewer number of weights in the network.