2D T1-Weighted CE MRI Images Classification with Hybrid Channel Attention Block enhanced VGG-16 and MobileNet

Motivated by the imperative need for precise and swift classification of brain tumors depicted in MRI images, this study unveils a novel classification network tailored explicitly for this task. Existing lightweight methodologies, although explored extensively, have fallen short of achieving the accuracy benchmarks attained by the model. The approach underwent rigorous testing on a challenging 2D T1-weighted CE-MRI dataset housing three distinct types of brain tumors: Meningioma, Glioma, and Pituitary. Recognizing the susceptibility of models to overfitting during training, introduced was a normalized combined channel and spatial attention mechanism, strategically incorporated to serve as an effective regularizer. Comparative analysis against state-of-the-art methodologies on this dataset highlights a notable performance boost of 2.12 percentage points achieved by integrating this attention mechanism into a base network. Furthermore, the fusion of the model with the pre-trained VGG16 network and GoogleNet into an ensemble demonstrates superior accuracy; however, this amalgamation comes at the expense of execution speed.