Attention-Gated CNN and discrete wavelet transform based ensemble framework for brain hemorrhage classification

Brain hemorrhage, or Intracranial Hemorrhage (ICH), is a critical medical condition requiring rapid diagnosis. Existing Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models often struggle to differentiate similar hemorrhage subtypes like Epidural (EDH) and Subdural (SDH) due to a lack of specific spatial feature identification. This study aims to develop a robust classification framework to address this challenge. We propose an ensemble framework combining two complementary models. The first is an attention-gated 2D CNN designed to highlight subtle hemorrhagic regions. The second is a multi-level Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) model that analyzes images in the frequency domain to capture deeper contextual and textural information from the 3D brain volume. The proposed ensemble model was evaluated on the RSNA, CQ500, and a new GMC clinical dataset. The empirical study demonstrates that our model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across standard evaluation metrics, including accuracy, macro-averaged AUC-ROC, specificity, sensitivity, and F1-score. The novel ensembling of an attention-gated CNN and a DWT-based model provides a more comprehensive feature representation, leading to significantly improved accuracy and robustness in ICH classification, particularly in distinguishing challenging subtypes like EDH and SDH.