Abstract:According to the World Health Organization, cancer is the second leading cause of death worldwide, responsible for over 9.5 million deaths in 2018 alone. Brain tumors count for one out of every four cancer deaths. Accurate and timely diagnosis of brain tumors will lead to more effective treatments. To date, several image classification approaches have been proposed to aid diagnosis and treatment. We propose an encoder layer that uses post-max-pooling features for residual learning. Our approach shows promising results by improving the tumor classification accuracy in MR images using a limited medical image dataset. Experimental evaluations of this model on a dataset consisting of 3064 MR images show 95-98% accuracy, which is better than previous studies on this database.