A deep learning model to classify and detect brain abnormalities in portable microwave based imaging system

Automated classification and detection of brain abnormalities like tumors from microwave head images is essential for investigating and monitoring disease progression. This paper presents the automatic classification and detection of human brain abnormalities through the deep learning-based YOLOv5 model in microwave head images. The YOLOv5 is a faster object detection model, which has a less computational architecture with high accuracy. At the beginning, the backscattered signals are collected from the implemented 3D wideband nine antennas array-based microwave head imaging (MWHI) system, where one antenna operates as a transmitter and the remaining eight antennas operate as receivers. In this research, fabricated tissue-mimicking head phantom with a benign and malignant tumor as brain abnormalities, which is utilized in MWHI system. Afterwards, the M-DMAS (modified-delay-multiply-and-sum) imaging algorithm is applied on the post-processed scattering parameters to reconstruct head regions image with 640×640 pixels. Three hundred sample images are collected, including benign and malignant tumors from various locations in head regions by the MWHI system. Later, the images are preprocessed and augmented to create a final image dataset containing 3600 images, and then used for training, validation, and testing the YOLOv5 model. Subsequently, 80% of images are utilized for training, and 20% are used for testing the model. Then from the 80% training dataset, 20% is utilized for validation to avoid overfitting. The brain abnormalities classification and detection performances with various datasets are investigated by the YOLOv5s, YOLOv5m, and YOLOv5l models of YOLOv5. It is investigated that the YOLOv5l model showed the best result for abnormalities classification and detection compared to other models. However, the achieved training accuracy, validation loss, precision, recall, F1-score, training and validation classification loss, and mean average precision (mAP) are 99.84%, 9.38%, 93.20%, 94.80%, 94.01%, 0.004, 0.0133, and 96.20% respectively for the YOLOv5l model, which ensures the better classification and detection accuracy of the model. Finally, a testing dataset with different scenarios is evaluated through the three versions of the YOLOv5 model, and conclude that brain abnormalities classification and detection with location are successfully classified and detected. Thus, the deep model is applicable in the portable MWHI system.