Development of a CNN for Adult Brain Tumour Characterisation: Implications and Future Directions for Transfer Learning

Brain tumours are the most commonly occurring solid tumours in children, albeit with lower incidence rates compared to adults. However, their inherent heterogeneity, ethical considerations regarding paediatric patients, and difficulty in long-term follow-up make it challenging to gather large homogenous datasets for analysis. This study focuses on the development of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for brain tumour characterisation using the adult BraTS 2020 dataset. We propose to transfer knowledge, from models pre-trained on extensive adult brain tumour datasets to smaller cohort datasets (e.g., paediatric brain tumours) in future studies, by leveraging Transfer Learning (TL). This approach aims to extract relevant features from pre-trained models, addressing the limited availability of annotated paediatric datasets and enhancing tumour characterisation in children. The implications and potential applications of this methodology in paediatric neuro-oncology are discussed.