Brain tumors are neurological diseases with a high potential impact on the lives of affected individuals, requiring a rapid and accurate diagnosis through complementary imaging tests, such as magnetic resonance imaging, which is considered the gold standard in this process. Considering the need for faster diagnosis, classification systems based on Machine Learning have been developed and within this context, this dissertation aims to present a comparative study between a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and a CNN with an attention mechanism, developed for the classification of brain tumors from magnetic resonance images. The comparative study aims to identify the impact of the attention mechanism on the performance of the CNN for tumor classification. For the development and evaluation of the proposed models, a public database was used, collected from the Kaggle website and made available by Masoud Nickparvar, which is composed of 7023 brain magnetic resonance images, segmented into four classes: glioma, meningioma, no tumor and pituitary. As a result, from the performance metrics obtained, considering the image base used for testing in both CNNs, an improvement in the CNN performance was observed after the introduction of the attention mechanism, where the network with this mechanism presented an increase of 1.98% in the accuracy metric, 2.07% in the precision metric, 2.18% in the sensitivity metric and 1.72% in the F1-score metric in relation to the CNN without the attention mechanism. It is also possible to highlight the results obtained in particular for the meningioma tumor class, since the CNN without the attention mechanism presented difficulties in classifying this class and, after the integration of the attention mechanism, the model obtained an accuracy increase of 6.54% for this class.
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