Brain tumor detection based on features extracted and classified using a low-complexity neural network

Abstract

Brain tumor detection or brain tumor classification is one of the most challenging problems in modern medicine, where patients suffering from benign or malignant brain tumors are usually characterized by low life expectancy making the necessity of a punctual and accurate diagnosis mandatory. However, even today, this kind of diagnosis is based on manual classification of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), culminating in inaccurate conclusions especially when they derive from inexperienced doctors. Hence, trusted, automatic classification schemes are essential for the reduction of humans’ death rate due to this major chronic disease. In this article, we propose an automatic classification tool, using a computationally economic convolutional neural network (CNN), for the purposes of a binary problem concerning MRI images depicting the existence or the absence of brain tumors. The proposed model is based on a dataset containing real MRI images of both classes with nearly perfect validation-testing accuracy and low computational complexity, resulting a very fast and reliable training-validation process. During our analysis we compare the diagnostic capacity of three alternative loss functions, validating the appropriateness of cross entropy function, while underlining the capability of an alternative loss function named Jensen-Shannon divergence since our model accomplished nearly excellent testing accuracy, as with cross-entropy. The multiple validation tests applied, enhancing the robustness of the produced results, render this low-complexity CNN structure as an ideal and trustworthy medical aid for the classification of small datasets.