Lesion Segmentation in Moderate to Severe Traumatic Brain Injury: An nnU-Net Based Approach with Adaptive Normalization in the AIMS-TBI 2025 Challenge

Abstract

The segmentation of lesions in Moderate to Severe Traumatic Brain Injury (msTBI) from T1-weighted MRI presents a significant clinical challenge due to the profound heterogeneity of lesion characteristics in terms of size, shape, and location. To address this, the AIMS-TBI 2025 Challenge was organized to promote the development of robust and accurate segmentation algorithms. In this paper, we present our deep learning-based solution. Our methodology employs the nnU-Net framework with an adaptive intensity normalization strategy confined to the brain parenchyma, effectively reducing inter-subject variability and mitigating artifacts from non-brain structures. Upon final evaluation on the held-out test set, our method demonstrated highly competitive performance on the official leaderboard, achieving an Overall Dice Coefficient of 0.6305. The model obtained a Dice score of 0.4805 for lesion segmentation and 0.9324 for non-lesion tissue. While the lesion Dice reflects the difficulty of detecting highly heterogeneous lesions, the high non-lesion Dice primarily indicates the model's strong ability to correctly identify non-lesion voxels, demonstrating good specificity in differentiating lesion from non-lesion regions. These results demonstrate that incorporating anatomically constrained normalization within the nnU-Net pipeline is a powerful and effective strategy for tackling the complexities of msTBI lesion segmentation.