Data Augmentation for Brain-Tumor Segmentation: A Review

Data augmentation is a popular technique which helps improve generalization capabilities of deep neural networks, and can be perceived as implicit regularization. It plays a pivotal role in scenarios in which the amount of high-quality ground-truth data is limited, and acquiring new examples is costly and time-consuming. This is a very common problem in medical image analysis, especially tumor delineation. In this paper, we review the current advances in data-augmentation techniques applied to magnetic resonance images of brain tumors. To better understand the practical aspects of such algorithms, we investigate the papers submitted to the Multimodal Brain Tumor Segmentation Challenge (BraTS 2018 edition), as the BraTS dataset became a standard benchmark for validating existent and emerging brain-tumor detection and segmentation techniques. We verify which data augmentation approaches were exploited and what was their impact on the abilities of underlying supervised learners. Finally, we highlight the most promising research directions to follow in order to synthesize high-quality artificial brain-tumor examples which can boost the generalization abilities of deep models.