Early diagnosis of pathological brains leads to early interventions in brain diseases, which may help control the illness conditions, prolong the life of patients, and even cure them. Therefore, the classification of brain diseases is a challenging but helpful task. However, it is hard to collect brain images, and the superabundance of images is also a great challenge for computing resources. This study proposes a new approach named TReC: Transferred Residual Networks (ResNet)-Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), a specific model for small-scale samples, to detect brain diseases based on MRI. At first, the ResNet model, which is pre-trained on the ImageNet dataset, serves as initialization. Subsequently, a simple attention mechanism named CBAM is introduced and added into every ResNet residual block. At the same time, the fully connected (FC) layers of the ResNet are replaced with new FC layers, which meet the goal of classification. Finally, all the parameters of our model, such as the ResNet, the CBAM, and new FC layers, are retrained. The effectiveness of the proposed model is evaluated on brain magnetic resonance (MR) datasets for multi-class and two-class tasks. Compared with other state-of-the-art models, our model reaches the best performance for two-class and multi-class tasks on brain diseases.

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