A deep learning based system for accurate diagnosis of brain tumors using T1-w MRI

Abstract

Detection and classification of brain tumors are of formidable importance in neuroscience. Deep learning (DL), specifically convolution neural networks (CNN), has demonstrated breakthroughs <br />in the field of brain image analysis and brain tumors classification. This work proposes a novel CNN based model for brain tumor classification. Our pipeline starts with prepossessing and data augmentation techniques. Then, a CNN classification step is developed and utilizes ResNet50 architecture as its core. Particularly, our design modified the ResNet50 output with a global average pooling (GAP) layer to avoid over-fitting. The proposed model is trained and tested using different optimization algorithms. The final classification is achieved using a sigmoid layer. We tested the proposed structure on T1 weighted contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance images (T1-w MRI) that are collected from three datasets. A total of 3586 images containing two classes (i.e., bengin, and malignant) were used in our experiments. The proposed model reach highest accuracy 99.8%, and optimal error 0.005 using Adam when compared with other six well-known CNN architectures.