Brain tumors rank among the most lethal types of tumors. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) technology can clearly display the position, size, and borders of the tumors. Hence, MRI is frequently used in clinical diagnostics to detect brain tumors. Deep learning and related methods have been widely used in computer vision research recently for diagnosis and classification of MRI images of brain tumors. One trend is to achieve better performance by increasing model complexity. However, at the same time, the trainable parameters of the model increases accordingly. Too many parameters will lead to more difficult model training and optimization, and are prone to overfitting. To address this problem, this study constructs a model that incorporates a depthwise separable convolution technique and an attention mechanism to balance model performance and complexity. The model achieves 97.41% accuracy in the brain tumor classification task, which exceeds the 96.72% accuracy of the pre-trained model MobileNetV2, and shows good image classification ability. Future work could test the model's classification results on noisy images and investigate how to optimize the model's generalization ability.
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