General vs Domain-Specific CNNs: Understanding Pretraining Effects on Brain MRI Tumor Classification

Research comparing CNN architectures for brain tumor classification found that general-purpose models like ConvNeXt-Tiny (93% accuracy) outperformed domain-specific medical pre-trained models like RadImageNet DenseNet121 (68% accuracy). The study suggests that contemporary general-purpose CNNs with diverse pre-training may be more effective for medical imaging tasks in data-scarce scenarios.