MultiTumor Analyzer (MTA-20–55): A network for efficient classification of detected brain tumors from MRI images

Abstract

Brain cancer, one of the leading causes of mortality worldwide, is caused by brain tumors. Early diagnosis of tumors and predicting their progression can help doctors to save lives. In this article, we have designed an automated approach for locating and classifying tumors from MRI images. The novelties of the research work include the following two stages: Developing an encoder-decoder type 20-Layered deep neural network (DNN) named MultiTumor Analyzer (MTA-20) with 15 down-sampling layers and 4 up-sampling layers, the segmentation is performed in the initial stage. Here, we have adhered a Leaky ReLU activation function instead of ReLU which learn a parameter with negative values that may have valuable information which is essential specifically for image segmentation. Further, a 55-layered DNN using multistage feature fusion is developed in the second stage of the work for the classification of localized tumors. The classification is performed using developed MultiTumor Analyzer (MTA-55) DNN with Softmax classifier. The efficacy of the designed network is validated using highly cited quantitative measures such as accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, dice similarity coefficient (DSC), precision, and F1-measure. It is observed that the proposed MTA-20 DNN attains the average accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, DSC, and precision of 99.2 %, 94.6 %, 99.3 %, 88 %, and 82.5 % respectively against seven state-of-the-art techniques. Also, it is found that, the proposed MTA-55 DNN provides the overall accuracy, recall, specificity, F1-measure, precision, and DSC of 99.8 %, 99.633 %, 99.844 %, 99.659 %, 99.689 %, and 99.656 % respectively as compared to thirteen state-of-the-art techniques. These results corroborate the superiority of the proposed technique.