Effective and efficient multitask learning for brain tumor segmentation

Recently, brain tumor segmentation has achieved great success, partially because of deep learning-based relation exploration and multiscale analysis. However, the computational complexity hinders the real-time application. In this paper, we propose a revised multitask learning approach in which a lightweight network with only two scales is adopted to segment different kinds of tumor regions. Moreover, we design a hybrid hard sampling method that considers both sample sparsity and effectiveness. Extensive experiments on the BraTS19 segmentation challenge dataset have shown that our proposed method improves the Dice coefficient by a margin of 0.4–1.0 for different kinds of brain tumor regions and obtains results that are competitive with state-of-the-art brain tumor segmentation approaches.