GT-Net: global transformer network for multiclass brain tumor classification using MR images

Multiclass classification of brain tumors from magnetic resonance (MR) images is challenging due to high inter-class similarities. To this end, convolution neural networks (CNN) have been widely adopted in recent studies. However, conventional CNN architectures fail to capture the small lesion patterns of brain tumors. To tackle this issue, in this paper, we propose a global transformer network dubbed GT-Net for multiclass brain tumor classification. The GT-Net mainly comprises a global transformer module (GTM), which is introduced on the top of a backbone network. A generalized self-attention block (GSB) is proposed to capture the feature inter-dependencies not only across spatial dimension but also channel dimension, thereby facilitating the extraction of the detailed tumor lesion information while ignoring less important information. Further, multiple GSB heads are used in GTM to leverage global feature dependencies. We evaluate our GT-Net on a benchmark dataset by adopting several backbone networks, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of GTM. Further, comparison with state-of-the-art methods validates the superiority of our model.