Dilated SE-DenseNet for brain tumor MRI classification.

In the field of medical imaging, particularly MRI-based brain tumor classification, we propose an advanced convolutional neural network (CNN) leveraging the DenseNet-121 architecture, enhanced with dilated convolutional layers and Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) networks' attention mechanisms. This novel approach aims to improve upon state-of-the-art methods of tumor identification. Our model, trained and evaluated on a comprehensive Kaggle brain tumor dataset, demonstrated superior performance over established convolution-based and transformer-based models: ResNet-101, VGG-19, original DenseNet-121, MobileNet-V2, ViT-L/16, and Swin-B across key metrics: F1-score, accuracy, precision, and recall. The results underscore the effectiveness of our architectural enhancements in medical image analysis. Future research directions include optimizing dilation layers and exploring various architectural configurations. The study highlights the significant role of machine learning in improving diagnostic accuracy in medical imaging, with potential applications extending beyond brain tumor detection to other medical imaging tasks.