A Novel Framework for Brain Tumor Detection Based on Convolutional Variational Generative Models

Brain tumor detection can make the difference between life and death. Recently, deep learning-based brain tumor detection techniques have gained attention due to their higher performance. However, obtaining the expected performance of such deep learning-based systems requires large amounts of classified images to train the deep models. Obtaining such data is usually boring, time-consuming, and can easily be exposed to human mistakes which hinder the utilization of such deep learning approaches. This paper introduces a novel framework for brain tumor detection and classification. The basic idea is to generate a large synthetic MRI images dataset that reflects the typical pattern of the brain MRI images from a small class-unbalanced collected dataset. The resulted dataset is then used for training a deep model for detection and classification. Specifically, we employ two types of deep models. The first model is a generative model to capture the distribution of the important features in a set of small class-unbalanced brain MRI images. Then by using this distribution, the generative model can synthesize any number of brain MRI images for each class. Hence, the system can automatically convert a small unbalanced dataset to a larger balanced one. The second model is the classifier that is trained using the large balanced dataset to detect brain tumors in MRI images. The proposed framework acquires an overall detection accuracy of 96.88% which highlights the promise of the proposed framework as an accurate low-overhead brain tumor detection system.