Data Augmentation and Transfer Learning for Brain Tumor Detection in Magnetic Resonance Imaging

The exponential growth of deep learning networks has allowed us to tackle complex tasks, even in fields as complicated as medicine. However, using these models requires a large corpus of data for the networks to be highly generalizable and with high performance. In this sense, data augmentation methods are widely used strategies to train networks with small data sets, being vital in medicine due to the limited access to data. A clear example of this is magnetic resonance imaging in pathology scans associated with cancer. In this vein, we compare the effect of several conventional data augmentation schemes on the ResNet50 network for brain tumor detection. In addition, we included our strategy based on principal component analysis. The training was performed with the network trained from zeros and transfer-learning, obtained from the ImageNet dataset. The investigation allowed us to achieve an F1 detection score of 92.34%. The score was achieved with the ResNet50 network through the proposed method and implementing the learning transfer. In addition, it was also concluded that the proposed method is different from the other conventional methods with a significance level of 0.05 through the Kruskal Wallis test statistic.