Scaling High-Capacity ResUNet with Dynamic Batch for Universal Brain Tumor Segmentation
摘要
The vast heterogeneity of brain tumors—spanning patient populations, imaging acquisitions, and the fundamental biological differences between primary and metastatic disease—poses a significant obstacle to developing universal AI-based segmentation models. Addressing the MICCAI BraTS 2025 “Generalizability of Segmentation Methods Across Tumors” (GoAT) challenge, we developed a highly tailored framework within the nnU-Net v2 architecture. This features a deep, six-level residual encoder U-Net with a Focal Loss objective for complex features. Our core contribution is a novel dynamic batching strategy (3 \(\rightarrow \) 2 \(\rightarrow \) 1). This approach maximizes GPU memory utilization, enabling high-resolution training of our large-capacity model on a single consumer-grade GPU—obviating the need for multi-GPU compute clusters—while improving training efficiency and promoting generalization. After 5-fold cross-validation on the official training data (n=1,351), our model was evaluated on the blind validation set (n=451). Our solution achieved exceptional mean and median Dice scores of 0.8704 and 0.9367 (WT), 0.8542 and 0.9382 (TC), and 0.7759 and 0.8989 (ET), with a corresponding median 95th percentile Hausdorff Distance of 2.00 mm for the tumor core. These results validate our method’s robust generalization across a wide spectrum of tumor morphologies and prove the power of strategic, resource-efficient training innovations in creating a single, clinically-relevant universal model.