State-of-the-Art CNN Optimizer for Brain Tumor Segmentation in Magnetic Resonance Images

Brain tumors have become a leading cause of death around the globe. The main reason for this epidemic is the difficulty conducting a timely diagnosis of the tumor. Fortunately, magnetic resonance images (MRI) are utilized to diagnose tumors in most cases. The performance of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) depends on many factors (i.e., weight initialization, optimization, batches and epochs, learning rate, activation function, loss function, and network topology), data quality, and specific combinations of these model attributes. When we deal with a segmentation or classification problem, utilizing a single optimizer is considered weak testing or validity unless the decision of the selection of an optimizer is backed up by a strong argument. Therefore, optimizer selection processes are considered important to validate the usage of a single optimizer in order to attain these decision problems. In this paper, we provides a comprehensive comparative analysis of popular optimizers of CNN to benchmark the segmentation for improvement. In detail, we perform a comparative analysis of 10 different state-of-the-art gradient descent-based optimizers, namely Adaptive Gradient (Adagrad), Adaptive Delta (AdaDelta), Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), Adaptive Momentum (Adam), Cyclic Learning Rate (CLR), Adaptive Max Pooling (Adamax), Root Mean Square Propagation (RMS Prop), Nesterov Adaptive Momentum (Nadam), and Nesterov accelerated gradient (NAG) for CNN. The experiments were performed on the BraTS2015 data set. The Adam optimizer had the best accuracy of 99.2% in enhancing the CNN ability in classification and segmentation.