The Teacher–Assistant–Student Collaborative and Competitive Network for Brain Tumor Segmentation with Missing Modalities

<b>Background</b>: Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) provides rich tumor information through different imaging modalities (T1, T1ce, T2, and FLAIR). Each modality offers distinct contrast and tissue characteristics, which help in the more comprehensive identification and analysis of tumor lesions. However, in clinical practice, only a single modality of medical imaging is available due to various factors such as imaging equipment. The performance of existing methods is significantly hindered when handling incomplete modality data. <b>Methods</b>: A Teacher-Assistant-Student Collaborative and Competitive Net (TASCCNet) is proposed, which is based on traditional knowledge distillation techniques. First, a Multihead Mixture of Experts (MHMoE) module is developed with multiple experts and multiple gated networks to enhance information from fused modalities. Second, a competitive function is formulated to promote collaboration and competition between the student network and the teacher network. Additionally, we introduce an assistant module inspired by human visual mechanisms to provide supplementary structural knowledge, which enriches the information available to the student and facilitates a dynamic teacher-assistant collaboration. <b>Results</b>: The proposed model (TASCCNet) is evaluated on the BraTS 2018 and BraTS 2021 datasets and demonstrates robust performance even when only a single modality is available. <b>Conclusions</b>: TASCCNet successfully addresses the challenge of incomplete modality data in brain tumor segmentation by leveraging collaborative knowledge distillation and competitive learning mechanisms.