Detecting pathological brain via ResNet and randomized neural networks

Brain disease is one of the leading causes of death nowadays. Medical imaging is the most effective method for brain disease diagnosis, which provides a clear view of the interior brain. However, manual interpretation requires too much time and effort because medical images contain a large volume of information. Computer aided diagnosis is playing a more and more significant role in the clinic, which can help doctors and physicians to analyze medical images automatically. In this study, a novel pathological brain detection system was proposed for brain magnetic resonance images based on ResNet and randomized neural networks. Firstly, a ResNet was employed as the feature extractor, which was a famous convolutional neural network structure. Then, we used three randomized neural networks, i.e., the Schmidt neural network, the random vector functional-link net, and the extreme learning machine. The weights and biases in the three networks were trained by the chaotic bat algorithm. The three proposed methods achieved similar results based on five runs, and they yielded comparable performance in comparison with state-of-the-art approaches.