Toward more accurate diagnosis of multiple sclerosis: automated lesion segmentation in brain magnetic resonance image using modified U-Net model

Early diagnosis of multiple sclerosis (MS) through the delineation of lesions in the brain magnetic resonance imaging is important in preventing the deteriorating condition of MS. This study aims to develop a modified U-Net model for automating lesions segmentation in MS more accurately. The proposed modified U-Net uses residual dense blocks to replace the standard convolutional stacks and incorporates three axes (axial, sagittal, and coronal) of 2D slice images as input. Furthermore, a custom fusion method is also introduced for merging the predicted lesions from different axes. The model was implemented on ISBI2015 and OpenMS data sets. On ISBI2015, the proposed model achieves the best overall score of 93.090% and DSC of 0.857 on the OpenMS data set.