  Deep learning for regression tasks on medical imaging data has shown
promising results. However, compared to other approaches, their power is
strongly linked to the dataset size. In this study, we evaluate
3D-convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and classical regression methods with
hand-crafted features for survival time regression of patients with high grade
brain tumors. The tested CNNs for regression showed promising but unstable
results. The best performing deep learning approach reached an accuracy of
51.5% on held-out samples of the training set. All tested deep learning
experiments were outperformed by a Support Vector Classifier (SVC) using 30
radiomic features. The investigated features included intensity, shape,
location and deep features. The submitted method to the BraTS 2018 survival
prediction challenge is an ensemble of SVCs, which reached a cross-validated
accuracy of 72.2% on the BraTS 2018 training set, 57.1% on the validation set,
and 42.9% on the testing set. The results suggest that more training data is
necessary for a stable performance of a CNN model for direct regression from
magnetic resonance images, and that non-imaging clinical patient information is
crucial along with imaging information.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition;Machine Learning