Fully automated deep learning and machine learning –based prognosis models for survival prediction of brain tumor patients using multi-modal mri images

Brain tumor is one of the most deadly types of cancer diseases. Accurate assessment of pre-surgical prognosis for patients with this disease can lead to better patient management. While Biopsy is the most commonly used diagnostic technique in routine clinical applications of prognosis estimation, it has several disadvantages such as it is invasive, and prone to tissue trauma. Consequently, automated pre-operative prognosis estimation techniques based on MRI images are recently getting attention, so noninvasive. However, most of the recently developed automated techniques are based on the handcrafted image features extracted from the manually segmented tumor regions in MRI, which is tedious & time-consuming. This study aimed to develop fully automated pre-operative prognostic models for the survival time, and glioma grade predictions in multi-modal MRI images of patients with brain tumors by using two-stage learning-based methods. In the first stage, we developed novel CNN architectures using pre-trained deep learning models as backend. In the second stage, the outputs of CNN models were fused using various classical machine learning methods to get the final prediction results. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed prognostic models achieve AUC values of 99.7%, and 93% in glioma grading, and survival time predictions, respectively, outperforming current state-of-the-art results.