Explainable ensemble deep learning-based model for brain tumor detection and classification

Abstract Brain tumors are very dangerous as they cause death. A lot of people die every year because of brain tumors. Therefore, accurate classification and detection in the early stages can help in recovery. Various deep learning techniques have achieved good results in brain tumor classification. The traditional deep learning methods and training the neural network from scratch are time-consuming and can last for weeks of training. Therefore, in this work, we proposed an ensemble approach depending on transfer learning that utilizes pre-trained models of DenseNet121 and InceptionV3 to detect three forms of brain tumors: meningioma, glioma, and pituitary. While developing the ensemble model, some changes were made to the architecture of pre-trained models by replacing their classifiers (fully connected and SoftMax layers) with a new classifier to adopt the recent task. In addition, gradient-weighted class activation maps (Grad-CAM) are an explainable model to verify results and achieve high confidence. The suggested model was validated using a publicly available dataset and achieved 99.02% accuracy, 98.75% precision, 98.98% recall, and a 98.86% F1 score. The suggested approach outperformed others in detecting and classifying brain tumor MRI data, and verifying results using the explainable model achieved a high degree of trust.