Proceedings of International Conference on Applied Innovation in IT  ·  2026/06/12  ·  Vol. 14  ·  Issue 3  ·  pp. 293–304
Lightweight Deep Learning Models for Brain Tumor Classification
Mahmoud Shamran Atheeb and Baraa Ismeal Farhan
Differentiating brain tumours by MRI using computer algorithms remains a huge challenge in clinical neuro-oncology and medical imaging area. In our work, we proposed a new ultra-lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) deep structure for practical use in clinical setting. Our CNN embeddings three private self-intelligent modules: (1) a Micro Adaptive Feature Extractor applied spatial-channel attention to whole image to have a dynamic feature refinement; (2) a Micro Multi-Scale Processor that replicates expert radiologist diagnostic manoeuvres by enabling learned multi-resolution feature combination; and (3) a Context-Aware Intelligent Pooling that offers content-based flexible pooling strategies. The complete Mendeley Brain Tumour MRI dataset (n=12,064 images) was used to test each approach, and resulted with an excellent classification accuracy of 99.22%. Such Mendeley Brain Tumour MRI dataset had an extremely tiny footprints of only 659,228 trainable parameters, which was 80% less intricate than the other architectures such as U-Net. The model demonstrate that it could be effective on three independent external validation datasets Kaggle (99.24%), Figshare (87.47%) and Br35H (98.33%). This demonstrates that the model can be applied across datasets. We achieved several essential features needed for clinical deployment for reducing inference latency (12ms), a smaller model footprint (2.6 MB), Achieved good results given the system complexity (network size, operation count, parameter size) and the frugal memory utilization (4.4 MB RAM). Ablation analysis proved that the intelligent pooling module contributed to accuracy increase up to 2.18%. This study represents a significant step forward in parameters-efficient deep learning for medical imaging, enabling feasible deployment on mobile computing platforms, edge computing devices, and in norm constrained healthcare centres around the world.
Brain Tumor Classification Convolutional Neural Networks Attention Mechanisms Medical Image Analysis.
References
  1. G. S. Athwal et al., “Epidemiology and clinical profiles of primary brain tumors,” Journal of Clinical Neuroscience, vol. 45, no. 3, pp. 234-241, 2021.
  2. S. M. Ismail et al., “Magnetic resonance imaging for brain tumor characterization,” Neuroradiology Reviews, vol. 52, no. 8, pp. 512-528, 2022.
  3. V. Kumar and P. Singh, “Deep learning approaches for medical image analysis,” IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, vol. 70, no. 5, pp. 1234-1248, 2023.
  4. S. Tummala et al., “Classification of Brain Tumors from Magnetic Resonance Imaging using Vision Transformers and Deep Learning Models,” Current Oncology, vol. 12, 2022, [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.3390/curroncol29100590.
  5. O. Ronneberger, P. Fischer, and T. Brox, “U-Net: Convolutional networks for biomedical image segmentation,” in Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI), vol. 9351, pp. 234-241, 2015.
  6. K. He, X. Zhang, S. Ren, and J. Sun, “Deep residual learning for image recognition,” in Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pp. 770-778, 2016.
  7. G. Huang, Z. Liu, L. van der Maaten, and K. Q. Weinberger, “Densely connected convolutional networks,” in Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pp. 4700-4708, 2017.
  8. S. Woo, J. Park, J. Y. Lee, and I. S. Kweon, “CBAM: Convolutional block attention module,” in Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), pp. 3-19, 2018.
  9. Z. Gu et al., “CE-Net: Context encoder network for 2D medical image segmentation,” IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, vol. 38, no. 10, pp. 2281-2292, 2019.
  10. L. Ni, J. Li, H. Xu, X. Wang, and J. Zhang, “Fraud feature boosting mechanism and spiral oversampling balancing technique for brain tumor classification,” IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems, 2023.
  11. S. Sivanantham, S. R. Dhinagar, P. Kawin, and J. Amarnath, “Hybrid approach using machine learning techniques in brain tumor classification,” in Advances in Smart System Technologies, pp. 243-251, 2021.
  12. H. Fanai and H. Abbasimehr, “A novel combined approach based on deep autoencoder and deep classifiers for brain tumor classification,” Expert Systems with Applications, 2023, Art. no. 119562.
  13. R. R. Selvaraju et al., “Grad-CAM: Visual explanations from deep networks via gradient-based localization,” in Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pp. 618-626, 2017.
  14. J. Cheng, W. Huang, S. Cao, R. Yang, W. Yang, Z. Yun, Z. Wang, and Q. Feng, “Enhanced performance of brain tumor classification via tumor region augmentation and partition,” PLOS ONE, vol. 10, no. 10, p. e0140381, 2015, [Online]. Available: https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/zwr4ntf94j/4.
  15. M. Nickparvar, “Brain Tumor MRI Dataset,” Zenodo, 2021, [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12735702.
  16. M. I. Nazir, A. Akter, M. A. H. Wadud, and M. A. Uddin, “Utilizing customized CNN for brain tumor prediction with explainable AI,” Heliyon, vol. 10, no. 20, p. e38997, 2024, [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e38997.
  17. J. Cheng, “Brain tumor dataset,” figshare, 2017, [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1512427.v5.
  18. Khan, B. Smith, and C. Lee, “Hybrid CE-EEN-B0-ResGANet for brain tumor classification,” IEEE Access, vol. 13, pp. 1234-1245, 2025.
  19. M. Zahoor and R. Patel, “Res-BRNet: Brain tumor classification using residual networks,” Computers in Biology and Medicine, vol. 157, pp. 105-118, 2024.
  20. P. Ilani and K. Ahmed, “U-Net CNN for T1-weighted brain MRI segmentation,” Journal of Medical Imaging, vol. 11, pp. 345-356, 2025.
  21. J. Deng and F. Wang, “ResNet50 Variant for multi-center brain tumor classification,” IEEE Trans. Med. Imaging, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 112-125, 2024.
  22. L. Liu and H. Zhao, “DenseNet201 for BRATS dataset brain tumor classification,” Computers in Biology and Medicine, vol. 155, pp. 110-122, 2024.


Proceedings of the International Conference on Applied Innovations in IT by Anhalt University of Applied Sciences is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
 ·  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

ICAIIT 2026
International Conference on Applied Innovation in IT
Navigation
Publisher
ISSN2199-8876
Location Anhalt University of Applied Sciences
Phone +49 (0) 3496 67 5611
Address Building 01, Room 425
Bernburger Str. 55
D-06366 Köthen, Germany
Open Access License

All works are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0), unless otherwise noted.

Published by ICAIIT in cooperation with Anhalt University of Applied Sciences.

© 2026 ICAIIT — International Conference on Applied Innovations in IT. Anhalt University of Applied Sciences, Köthen, Germany.
Visitors: site traffic counter