Transfer Learning for Automatic Brain Tumor Classification Using MRI Images

One of the most leading death causes in the world is brain tumor. Solving brain tumor segmentation and classification by relying mainly on classical medical image processing is a complex and challenging task. In fact, medical evidence shows that manual classification with human-assisted support can lead to improper prediction and diagnosis. This is mainly due to the variety and the similarity of tumors and normal tissues. Recently, deep learning techniques showed promising results towards improving accuracy of detection and classification of brain tumor from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In this paper, we propose a deep learning model for the classification of brain tumors from MRI images using convolutional neural network (CNN) based on transfer learning. The implemented system explores a number of CNN architectures, namely ResNet, Xception and MobilNet-V2. This latter achieved the best results with 98.24% and 98.42% in term of accuracy and F1-score, respectively.