Brain tumor classification by using a novel convolutional neural network structure

Brain tumors located in the skull are among the health problems that cause serious consequences. Rapid and accurate detection of brain tumor types will ensure that the patient receives appropriate treatment in the early period, thus increasing the patient's chance of recovery and survival. In the literature, classification accuracies over 98% have been acquired automatically by using deep neural networks (DNN) for the brain tumor images such as glioma, meningioma, and pituitary. It is observed that researchers generally focused on achieving higher classification accuracy and therefore, they have used pre-processing stages, augmentation processes, huge or hybrid DNN structures. These approaches have brought some disadvantages in terms of practical use of the developed methods: (i)The parameters of the pre-processes should be carefully determined, otherwise the classification accuracy will decrease. (ii) In order to increase the classification performance, it is important to determine the coarse structure of the DNN correctly. If the DNN has many hyper-parameters, the coarse structure will be determined in a long time. (iii) It is difficult to implement complex DNN structures or training algorithms in terms of practical use, because these methods need huge memory and high CPU computation. In this study, we have proposed a novel DNN model to increase the classification accuracy, and to decrease the number of weights in the structure, and to use less number of hyper-parameters. We named this model, which uses a divergence-based feature extractor, as DivFE-v1 for short. 99.18% classification accuracy for the Figshare dataset is obtained by using the small-sized DNN structure without any pre-processing stage or augmentation process.