An MRI-based deep learning approach for efficient classification of brain tumors

Efficient and reliable identification and classification of brain tumors from imaging data is essential in the diagnosis and treatment of brain cancer cells. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the most commonly used imaging modality in the analysis of infected brain tissue. However, manual segmentation requires significant time to process data produced by magnetic resonance imaging. In this study, we present two fast and proficient brain tumor identification techniques based on deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) using magnetic resonance imaging data for the effective detection and classification of different types of brain tumors. We use two publicly available datasets from Figshare and BraTS 2018, and apply conditional random fields to eliminate forged outputs, considering spatial information on fine segmentation tasks. The first proposed architecture, based on the Figshare dataset, classifies brain tumors as gliomas, meningiomas, or pituitary tumors. The second architecture differentiates between high- and low-grade gliomas (HGG and LGG, respectively). An intensity normalization method is also investigated as a pre-processing step, which proves highly effective at detection and classification of brain tumors in combination with data augmentation techniques. The Figshare and BraTS 2018 datasets included 3062 and 251 images, respectively. The experimental results demonstrate an accuracy of 97.3% and a dice similarity coefficient (DSC) 95.8% on the task of classifying brain tumor as gliomas, meningiomas, or pituitary tumors achieved by the first proposed CNN architecture, while second proposed CNN architecture achieved an accuracy of 96.5% with a DSC of 94.3% on the task of classifying glioma grades as HGG or LGG. Experimental results reveal that our proposed model attained improved performance and increased classification accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods.