Brain Tumor Classification Using Pretrained
Convolutional Neural Networks
Mihalaș Constantin Daniel
Measurements and Optical Electronics Department
Politechnica University Timisoara
2021 16th International Conference on Engineering of Modern Electric Systems (EMES) | 978-1-6654-4995-3/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/EMES52337.2021.9484102
Timișoara, Romania
constantin.mihalas@student.upt.ro
Abstract— Nowadays, deep learning methods have fulfilled
great image classification tasks. Convolutional neural networks
for classifying brain images into four classes: no tumor, glioma,
meningioma, and pituitary are introduced in this paper. The
used dataset is public and has 3064 MRI brain images from 233
patients, also we have added 980 images with no tumor. A
comparison between pretrained AlexNet, GoogleNet,
DenseNet201, and ResNet101 has been done using our dataset.
Our results show an accuracy of 98.76% obtained with fine-
tuned ResNet101.
Keywords— brain tumor, deep learning, convolutional
neural network, pretrained network, classification, accuracy.
I. INTRODUCTION
Brain is a complex organ within the physical body, it
weighs around 1.4 kilograms, and it is working with 100
billion neurons or nerve cells. Each brain neuron is connected,
through synapses, with thousands or maybe tens of thousands
of others neurons. A brain can form up to a million new
connections for every second of our lives. An uncontrolled
division of cells generates a brain tumor (BT). In the vicinity
or inside the brain an abnormal cells group is created. This
cells group can affect the correct brain activity and destroy
healthy cells [1].
Today, almost every clinic uses the World Health
Organization (WHO) classification to detect BT. According to
WHO, there are more than 120 BT types. Cell origin and
behaviour help classify BTs, from the least aggressive
(benign) to the most aggressive (malignant).
In recent years neural networks have grown very fast. The
implementation of accurate methods in training neural
networks has become extremely important in diverse health
informatics areas such as medical image analysis,
bioinformatics, and medical informatics [2].
II. PREVIOUS REFFERENCES
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) gained popularity
only in 2012, although they were initially introduced to the
public in 1998 by LeCun [3]. In 2012 Krizhevsky [4] designed
a winning CNN for the ImageNet competition that performed
considerably better than previous state of the art models. After
the ImageNet contest from 2012, the CNN’s importance
raised in image classification, and the computer vision
community adopted these network architectures.
In [5] Paul et al. used oblique BT images for CNN training,
and they introduced new methods for detection and
classification implementing CNNs. They obtained 91.43%
accuracy. In [6] Anaraki et al. suggest a network to emphasize
BTs in MRIs considering Genetic Algorithms (GA) and CNN.
978-1-6654-4995-3/21/$31.00 ©2021 European Union
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Lascu Mihaela Ruxandra
Measurements and Optical Electronics Department
Politechnica University Timisoara
Timișoara, Romania
mihaela.lascu@ upt.ro
They obtained 90.9% accuracy in glioma detection and 94.2%
in grades calculation. A CNN deep learning model was
introduced by Sultan et al. in [7] to classify different BT types.
They used open access datasets to classify BTs in (no tumor,
glioma, meningioma, and pituitary). The proposed
architecture obtained 96.13% accuracy. Different pretrained
networks investigations were presented in [8] by Mehrotra et
al. for enhancing BT classification in MRIs. The research
group used a PT - CNN for BT classification in two classes
benign and malign. They achieved an accuracy of 99.04%
using a finetuned AlexNet.
III. CONVOLUTIONAL NEURONAL NETWORKS
CNNs are a class of deep neural networks and consist of
neurons that have weights and biases. Each neuron obtains the
information from some inputs, then calculates a scalar product
and freely pursues it with a nonlinearity. CNN architectures
have images as inputs. This network design solves the image
classification task best.
In recent years CNN is a frequently adopted architecture
that can execute complicated operations using convolutional
filters [2], [9], [10]. A CNN architecture implements a
sequence of feedforward layers with convolutional filters and
pooling layers. This network architecture utilizes several fully
connected layers, after the last pooling layer, that convert
bidimensional feature maps from the previous layers into an
unidimensional vector for classification [11]. Not requiring
feature extraction is a CNN architecture advantage. A CNN
development from scratch is time consuming and
complicated. It is necessary to apply a large labelled dataset
for training before the model is ready for classification. CNNs
are using relatively little preprocessing compared to other
algorithms for image classification tasks. The network uses
filters that in classic algorithms were built manually. A great
advantage is that CNNs are independent of previous
knowledge and human effort in designing the features.
IV. PERFORMANCE PARAMETERS
The proposed BT detection and classification framework
calculates four significant metric equations, that check the
classifier effectiveness [7].
Accuracy measures the total number of predictions a
model gets right.
Precision evaluates how good the model is in predicting
positive labels.
Recall calculates the percentage of actual positives a
model identifies correctly.
F1 Score is the weighted average considering precision
and recall.
 Accuracy = (TP + TN) / (TP + TN + FP + FN)
Precision = TP / (TP + FP)
Recall = TP / (TP + FN)
F1 = 2 * (Precision * Recall) / (Precision + Recall) (4)
True positive (TP) predicts a positive class that is positive.
True negative (TN) predicts a negative class that is negative.
False Negatives (FN), also named Type II error, predicts a
negative class that is positive. False Positives (FP), also named
Type I error, predicts a positive class that is negative.
V. PRETRAINED NETS
A. AlexNet
The AlexNet architecture is presented in Fig.1. AlexNet is
a CNN designed by Alex Krizhevsky [4], which contains eight
layers after the input layer, firstly five layers are convolutional
layers and then the next three layers, last in the architecture,
are fully connected layers with 4096 neurons each.
B. DenseNet201
The DenseNet architecture is shown in Fig.2 and contains
four Dense Blocks (Dx). First an input layer, then transition
layers (Tx), and finally the global average pooling (GAP)
layer. The transition layers have a batch normalization layer,
a 1×1 convolutional layer, and a 2×2 average pooling layer
with a two stride. GAP is comparable to the classic pooling
approach, but GAP has a more severe feature map reduction.
In conclusion, GAP layer is minimizing the whole image into
a single-digit [13].
Fig. 1. AlexNet architecture [4].
Fig. 2. DenseNet 201 architecture [13].
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(1) C. GoogleNet
GoogleNet [12] is between the first architectures that
(2) recommended the inception block that significantly reduced
the number of trainable parameters in the network. The
(3) inception module operates with a parallel combination like
a 1 × 1 convolutional filter added before the 3 × 3, and 5 ×
5 convolutional blocks. Also, an alongside pooling layer is
implemented for dimension reduction, as shown in Fig.3 [15].
D. ResNet101
ResNet architecture [14] introduced by Microsoft is
showed in Fig.4.
The fundamental concept is to increase the number of
layers introducing a residual connection (with an identity
layer). This layer is connected directly with the next layer
improving the learning process.
VI. METHODOLOGY
Our proposed methodology is based on the pretrained
CNN’s architectures AlexNet, GoogleNet, DenseNet201, and
Resnet101 for classification. A specified classifier is detecting
the BT in brain MRIs. This methodology is implemented in
MATLAB and follows the below steps:
Step 1: MRI brain dataset acquisition.
Step 2: Extract the images.
Step 3: Resize the images to fit the CNN input layer.
Step 4: Import pretrained networks.
Step 5: Final layers replacement to get better precision and
accuracy for classification.
Step 6: Conduct experiments, compare, observe and
decide which network has the best results.
 Fig. 3. GoogleNet architecture [15].

Fig. 4. ResNet101 architecture [14].

A. Data Acquisition networks in MATLAB. Conclusively, we need to replace the

The dataset used in this paper is downloaded from final fully connected layer (FCL) of the network to fit in our
FigShare. This dataset is in .mat format which contains not image classification task. We can observe the changes in
just the MRIs but also some interesting details such as: label Table I.
(meningioma-1, glioma-2, pituitary tumor-3), patient D. Experiments
identification (PID), tumor border, and tumor mask. This
dataset contains 3064 images from 233 patients with three We used the Experiment Manager application provided by
types of BT: meningioma (708 images), glioma (1426 MATLAB to compare these four finetuned pretrained
images), and pituitary (930 images). Because our application networks. We created a function with multiple variable
has images as input, not .mat files, it is necessary to extract parameters like net, initialLearnRate, epochs, miniBatchSize,
from the datasets only the brain MRIs. To accomplish this, we and solver. We changed these parameters according to
created a MATLAB program to extract from the. mat datasets Table II to achieve the highest accuracy. To calculate the
only the images in the .PNG format having 1072 x 1072 pixels evaluation metrics for our pretrained networks, we
size. Finally, we obtained an adequate dataset with labelled implemented the previously presented formulas for accuracy,
MRIs. precision, recall, and F1-score.
VII. RESULTS
In addition to the previously obtained dataset, we added a
part of other datasets found in Kaggle, which contains two In this paper an optimal skeleton for best pretrainig and
folders (Yes-with tumors and No-without tumors) having 253 transfer learning is presented. The main purpose is to classify
brain MRIs. We selected only the part of the dataset without BT in no tumor, glioma, meningioma, and pituitary. The
tumors that have 98 Brain MRIs. Because 98 images from the feature self-extractions executed by the network are
Kaggle dataset are few compared to 3064 images from depending on their architecture. To perform our image
FigShare, these no tumor images are not enough to train the classification task in Fig.5, we have to finetune the last few
neural network. We used data augmentation, flipping or layers that belong to our pretrained networks. We used
shifting the image left/right or up/down, to create another nine MATLAB R2020b in our paper.
images for each image in the dataset. After data augmentation,
TABLE I THE NETWORKS LAST THREE LAYERS MODIFICATIONS
the dataset consists of 980 brain MRIs without tumors having
630 x 630 pixels size in JPG format. In total, our final image Network Layer Original Replaced
dataset contains 4044 images split into four categories. This Dense Last-2 Pretrained architecture FCL 1000 FCL four with bias one
end dataset is proper for our study, considering that our Net201 Last 1000 classes layer 4 classes layer
computer has an Intel Core I3-5010U CPU @2.1 GHz and Alex Last-2 Pretrained architecture FCL 1000 FCL four with bias two
Net
8GB RAM Memory. Last 1000 classes layer 4 classes layer
Res Last-2 Pretrained architecture FCL 1000 FCL four with bias one
B. Image Dataset Preparation for CNN Net101 Last 1000 classes layer 4 classes layer

Because each pretrained network expects an adequate Google Last-2 Pretrained architecture FCL 1000 FCL four with bias two
Net Last 1000 classes layer 4 classes layer
image input size, we need to resize all these images to fit the
input layer of the pretrained network. TABLE II FINE TUNING OF PARAMETERS
C. Final Layers Preparation for Pretrained Nets Parameter Values
It is mandatory to download the necessary add-on called net [“Googlenet","Alexnet","Densenet201",” Resnet101"]
initialLearnRate [1e-4,1e-3]
Deep Learning Toolbox Model for AlexNet, GoogleNet, epochs [6,7,8]
DenseNet201, and ResNet101 and to import the pretrained miniBatchSize [8,10]
solver ["sgdm" "adam" "rmsprop"]

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 Fig. 5. Training and validation results for AlexNet, GoogleNet, DenseNet201, and ResNet101.

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