RRFNet: A free-anchor brain tumor detection and classification network based on reparameterization technology

Advancements in medical imaging technology have facilitated the acquisition of high-quality brain images through computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), enabling professional brain specialists to diagnose brain tumors more effectively. However, manual diagnosis is time-consuming, which has led to the growing importance of automatic detection and classification through brain imaging. Conventional object detection models for brain tumor detection face limitations in brain tumor detection owing to the significant differences between medical images and natural scene images, as well as challenges such as complex backgrounds, noise interference, and blurred boundaries between cancerous and normal tissues. This study investigates the application of deep learning to brain tumor detection, analyzing the effect of three factors, the number of model parameters, input data batch size, and the use of anchor boxes, on detection performance. Experimental results reveal that an excessive number of model parameters or the use of anchor boxes may reduce detection accuracy. However, increasing the number of brain tumor samples improves detection performance. This study, introduces a backbone network built using RepConv and RepC3, along with FGConcat feature map splicing module to optimize the brain tumor detection model. The experimental results show that the proposed RepConv-RepC3-FGConcat Network (RRFNet) can learn underlying semantic information about brain tumors during training stage, while maintaining a low number of parameters during inference, which improves the speed of brain tumor detection. Compared with YOLOv8, RRFNet achieved a higher accuracy in brain tumor detection, with a mAP value of 79.2%. This optimized approach enhances both accuracy and efficiency, which is essential in clinical settings where time and precision are critical.