Degradation-Aware Blur-Segmentation of Brain Tumor

TL;DR

This paper introduces DABSeg, a novel 3D MRI brain tumor segmentation network that jointly addresses image blur caused by patient motion and improves segmentation accuracy, especially for small lesions.

Contribution

The paper presents a degradation-aware network that unifies deblurring and segmentation, with a feature-domain motion deblurring stem and a blur-aware cross-modal attention module, enhancing robustness under degenerative conditions.

Findings

DABSeg outperforms state-of-the-art methods in tumor Dice score.

It achieves higher boundary precision in tumor segmentation.

The joint loss improves small lesion detection and border accuracy.

Abstract

Multimodal 3D MRI brain tumor segmentation is a pivotal step in radiotherapy target delineation, surgical planning and post-treatment assessment. Existing methods often assume artifact-free MRI images. However, inevitable patient motion during scanning introduces artifacts and blur that degrade boundary and texture features, leading to poor segmentation performance. To bridge this gap, we introduce Degradation-Aware Blur-Segmentation Net (DABSeg), a synchronous deblurring 3D multimodal MRI segmentation network that unifies blur removal and accurate segmentation. Specifically, we propose a feature-domain motion-deblurring stem to compensate for blur and rebalance intensity. Concurrently, the backbone network embeds a blur-aware cross-modal cross-attention module and multi-scale residual aggregation to yield effective modality complementarity. Notably, we optimize a joint loss that combines weighted Dice with a clear-reference reconstruction term, where imbalanced weights are applied to small targets to boost learning intensity and predictive stability for small lesions and border regions. Systematic comparisons and ablation experiments on the BraTS2020 dataset under both clear and degenerative conditions consistently demonstrate that DABSeg surpasses state-of-the-art methods in tumor Dice score and boundary precision. These results validate the effectiveness of degenerative-aware cross-task collaborative learning in improving the robustness and clinical utility of multi-modal 3D brain tumor segmentation under realistic degenerative conditions. The source code is available at https://github.com/YuchunWang24/DABSeg_ICPR