CNN-LSTM: Cascaded Framework For Brain Tumour Classification

Glioma is common type of brain tumour in adults originating from glia cell. Despite advances in medical image analysis and gliomas research, accurate diagnosis remains a challenge. Gliomas can be in general classified into High Grade (HG) and Low Grade (LG). The exact classification of glioma helps in evaluating the disease progression and selection of the treatment strategy. Whilst medical image classification using a Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) has achieved remarkable success, but it is still difficult task for CNNs to accurately classify 3D medical images. One of the major limitation is the fact that CNNs are difficult to optimize in 3D volumetric classification. In current work, we addressed this challenge by introducing a cascade of CNN with Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) Network for classification of 3D brain tumor MR images into HG and LG glioma. Features from pre-trained VGG-16 were extracted and fed into LSTM network for learning high-level feature representations to classify the 3D brain tumour volumes into HG and LG glioma. The results showed that the features extracted from VGG-16 gave better classification accuracy as compared to the features extracted from AlexNet and ResNet.