Scratch Each Other's Back: Incomplete Multi-Modal Brain Tumor Segmentation via Category Aware Group Self-Support Learning

Although Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is very helpful for brain tumor segmentation and discovery, it often lacks some modalities in clinical practice. As a result, degradation of prediction performance is inevitable. According to current implementations, different modalities are considered to be independent and non-interfering with each other during the training process of modal feature extraction, however they are complementary. In this paper, considering the sensitivity of different modalities to diverse tumor regions, we propose a Category Aware Group Self-Support Learning framework, called GSS, to make up for the information deficit among the modalities in the individual modal feature extraction phase. Precisely, within each prediction category, predictions of all modalities form a group, where the prediction with the most extraordinary sensitivity is selected as the group leader. Collaborative efforts between group leaders and members identify the communal learning target with high consistency and certainty. As our minor contribution, we introduce a random mask to reduce the possible biases. GSS adopts the standard training strategy without specific architectural choices and thus can be easily plugged into existing incomplete multi-modal brain tumor segmentation. Remarkably, extensive experiments on BraTS2020, BraTS2018, and BraTS2015 datasets demonstrate that GSS can improve the performance of existing SOTA algorithms by 1.27-3.20% in Dice on average. The code is released at https://github.com/qysgithubopen/GSS.