A New Convolutional Neural Network Architecture for Automatic Detection of Brain Tumors in Magnetic Resonance Imaging Images

Brain diseases are mainly caused by abnormal growth of brain cells that may damage the brain structure, and eventually will lead to malignant brain cancer. An early diagnosis to enable decisive treatment using a Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) system has major challenges, especially accurate detection of different diseases in the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images. In this paper, a three-step preprocessing is proposed to enhance the quality of MRI images, along with a new Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) architecture for effective diagnosis of glioma, meningioma, and pituitary. The architecture uses batch normalization for fast training with a higher learning rate and ease initialization of the layer weights. The proposed architecture is a computationally lightweight model with a small number of convolutional, max-pooling layers and training iterations. A demonstrative comparison between the proposed architecture and other discussed models in this paper is conducted. An outstanding competitive accuracy is achieved of 98.22% overall, 99% in detecting glioma, 99.13% in detecting meningioma, 97.3% in detecting pituitary and 97.14% in detecting normal images when tested on a dataset with 3394 MRI images. Experimental results prove the robustness of the proposed architecture which has increased the detection accuracy of a variety of brain diseases in a short time.