MRI-based diagnosis of brain tumours using a deep neural network framework

The median survival time of patients with high grade glioma, a form of brain tumour, is 1-3 years. The current best practice adopts Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for image classification and tumour detection. This method provides a significant improvement in brain tumour segmentation of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images in comparison to other frameworks, but it is nonetheless slow and lacks precision. We sought to build upon the current best practice model by utilising a Deep Neural Network (DNN) model, which entailed modification of the segmentation and feature-extraction stages in order to improve the accuracy of those stages and the resulting segmentation. We contrasted the accuracy and efficiency of our model to the current best practice model using 10 brain tumour patient MRI datasets. First, the segmentation accuracy of our proposed model (M= 90%) outperformed that of the current best practice (M=78%). Second, the tumour detection processing time of our proposed model (M=34 ms) also outperformed that of the current best practice (M=73 ms). We, therefore, replicated previous studies by showing that automatic segmentation can aid in brain tumour detection. Importantly, we extended previous studies by proposing a model that classifies a brain tumour with greater accuracy and within lower processing times. Validation of the model with a larger dataset is recommended.