Multi-scale multi-hierarchy attention convolutional neural network for fetal brain extraction

•A 3D multi-scale multi-hierarchy attention convolutional neural network (MSMHA-CNN) is developed for fetal brain extraction in MR images.•A multi-scale feature learning block is proposed to learn the contextual features of highresolution in-plane slice and contextual features between slices of the fetal brain MR images with an-isotropic resolution.•We evaluate the proposed MSMHA-CNN method on collected fetal brain MR images. Experimental results show the excellent performance of our method.