A New Hybrid Model for Brain Tumor Recognition in MRI Images Based on Hand-Crafted Features and Deep Learning

Brain tumors are among the most life-threatening cancers that can affect people of any gender or age. MRI scans manually evaluated by an expert are the initial diagnostic procedure that precedes an appropriate treatment plan. However, the human factor involves the possibility of error, and the process itself can be time-consuming and resourceconsuming, ultimately putting patients’ lives at risk. Therefore, efforts are being made to automate the diagnostic process through computer-aided systems, of which artificial intelligence has become the basis. This paper presents a novel system for detecting brain abnormalities in MRI images that ensures high precision without compromising the simplicity of its operational structure. In the proposed model, numerical features are extracted from grayscale MRI images using the rectangular histogram of oriented gradients method. The resulting features are fed after dimensionality reduction to a specialized sequential deep network composed of 11 learnable layers. The classification accuracy of the model reached 99.51%, outperforming many analogues, making it a promising option for supporting the diagnostic decision-making process.