An explainable ensemble approach for advanced brain tumor classification applying Dual-GAN mechanism and feature extraction techniques over highly imbalanced data

Brain tumors are one of the leading diseases imposing a huge morbidity rate across the world every year. Classifying brain tumors accurately plays a crucial role in clinical diagnosis and improves the overall healthcare process. ML techniques have shown promise in accurately classifying brain tumors based on medical imaging data such as MRI scans. These techniques aid in detecting and planning treatment early, improving patient outcomes. However, medical image datasets are frequently affected by a significant class imbalance, especially when benign tumors outnumber malignant tumors in number. This study presents an explainable ensemble-based pipeline for brain tumor classification that integrates a Dual-GAN mechanism with feature extraction techniques, specifically designed for highly imbalanced data. This Dual-GAN mechanism facilitates the generation of synthetic minority class samples, addressing the class imbalance issue without compromising the original quality of the data. Additionally, the integration of different feature extraction methods facilitates capturing precise and informative features. This study proposes a novel deep ensemble feature extraction (DeepEFE) framework that surpasses other benchmark ML and deep learning models with an accuracy of 98.15%. This study focuses on achieving high classification accuracy while prioritizing stable performance. By incorporating Grad-CAM, it enhances the transparency and interpretability of the overall classification process. This research identifies the most relevant and contributing parts of the input images toward accurate outcomes enhancing the reliability of the proposed pipeline. The significantly improved Precision, Sensitivity and F1-Score demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism in handling class imbalance and improving the overall accuracy. Furthermore, the integration of explainability enhances the transparency of the classification process to establish a reliable model for brain tumor classification, encouraging their adoption in clinical practice promoting trust in decision-making processes.