Simple 3D MRI classification ranked bronze on Kaggle

This post walks through our submission to the recent Kaggle competition: RSNA-MICCAI Brain Tumor Radiogenomic Classification, which aims at brain tumor detection from 3D MRI scans. I briefly describe the competition and provide data. Later I design a simple training workflow building on several well-established frameworks to produce a robust baseline solution. This baseline received a bronze medal on the private leaderboard even though the public leaderboard score was lower! My takeaway is "simple is better than complex" and it's not wise to overfit the public leaderboards. The RSNA-MICCAI Brain Tumor Radiogenomic Classification competition addresses a fundamental medical screening challenge -- detecting a malignant tumor in the brain.