SegGuidedNet: Sub-Region-Aware Attention Supervision for Interpretable Brain Tumor Segmentation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Maqsood, Hasaan, Khan, Saif Ur Rehman, Vollmer, Sebastian, Dengel, Andreas, Asim, Muhammad Nabeel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Maqsood, Hasaan
Khan, Saif Ur Rehman
Vollmer, Sebastian
Dengel, Andreas
Asim, Muhammad Nabeel
author_facet Maqsood, Hasaan
Khan, Saif Ur Rehman
Vollmer, Sebastian
Dengel, Andreas
Asim, Muhammad Nabeel
contents Accurate segmentation of brain tumour sub-regions from multi-parametric MRI is critical for treatment planning yet remains challenging due to morphological variability, class imbalance, and overlapping appearances of tumour regions across imaging sequences. We propose SegGuidedNet, a three-dimensional residual encoder--decoder network introducing a novel SegAttentionGate module that explicitly supervises the decoder to produce spatially discriminative attention maps for each tumour sub-region necrotic core, peritumoral oedema, and enhancing tumour via a lightweight auxiliary loss, adding less than 0.2% parameter overhead. This sub-region supervision maintains decoder discriminability between visually ambiguous classes while providing free-of-cost spatial interpretability at inference without any post-hoc explanation method. Evaluated independently on BraTS2021 and BraTS2023 GLI across 251 held-out subjects each, SegGuidedNet achieves mean Dice of 0.905 (ET= 0.873, TC=0.906, WT=0.935) and 0.897 (ET=0.859, TC=0.902, WT=0.931) respectively, surpassing ensemble-based nnU-Net and HNF-Netv2 as a single model and approaching Swin UNETR a 10-model ensemble within 2--4 Dice points at a fraction of the inference cost. The consistency of results across two benchmark editions further confirms the generalisability of the proposed approach, offering competitive accuracy with built-in interpretability in a lightweight, clinically practical framework.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_22572
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SegGuidedNet: Sub-Region-Aware Attention Supervision for Interpretable Brain Tumor Segmentation
Maqsood, Hasaan
Khan, Saif Ur Rehman
Vollmer, Sebastian
Dengel, Andreas
Asim, Muhammad Nabeel
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Accurate segmentation of brain tumour sub-regions from multi-parametric MRI is critical for treatment planning yet remains challenging due to morphological variability, class imbalance, and overlapping appearances of tumour regions across imaging sequences. We propose SegGuidedNet, a three-dimensional residual encoder--decoder network introducing a novel SegAttentionGate module that explicitly supervises the decoder to produce spatially discriminative attention maps for each tumour sub-region necrotic core, peritumoral oedema, and enhancing tumour via a lightweight auxiliary loss, adding less than 0.2% parameter overhead. This sub-region supervision maintains decoder discriminability between visually ambiguous classes while providing free-of-cost spatial interpretability at inference without any post-hoc explanation method. Evaluated independently on BraTS2021 and BraTS2023 GLI across 251 held-out subjects each, SegGuidedNet achieves mean Dice of 0.905 (ET= 0.873, TC=0.906, WT=0.935) and 0.897 (ET=0.859, TC=0.902, WT=0.931) respectively, surpassing ensemble-based nnU-Net and HNF-Netv2 as a single model and approaching Swin UNETR a 10-model ensemble within 2--4 Dice points at a fraction of the inference cost. The consistency of results across two benchmark editions further confirms the generalisability of the proposed approach, offering competitive accuracy with built-in interpretability in a lightweight, clinically practical framework.
title SegGuidedNet: Sub-Region-Aware Attention Supervision for Interpretable Brain Tumor Segmentation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.22572