Deep Fusion Model for Brain Tumor Classification Using Fine-Grained Gradient Preservation

Brain tumors are one of the most common diseases that lead to early death if not diagnosed at an early stage. Traditional diagnostic approaches are extremely time-consuming and prone to errors. In this context, computer vision-based approaches have emerged as an effective tool for accurate brain tumor classification. While some of the existing solutions demonstrate noteworthy accuracy, the models become infeasible to deploy in areas where computational resources are limited. This research addresses the need for accurate and fast classification of brain tumors with a priority of deploying the model in technologically underdeveloped regions. The research presents a novel architecture for precise brain tumor classification fusing pretrained ResNet152V2 and modified VGG16 models. The proposed architecture undergoes a diligent fine-tuning process that ensures fine gradients are preserved in deep neural networks, which are essential for effective brain tumor classification. The proposed solution incorporates various image processing techniques to improve image quality and achieves an astounding accuracy of 98.36% and 98.04% in Figshare and Kaggle datasets respectively. This architecture stands out for having a streamlined profile, with only 2.8 million trainable parameters. We have leveraged 8-bit quantization to produce a model of size 73.881 MB, significantly reducing it from the previous size of 289.45 MB, ensuring smooth deployment in edge devices even in resource-constrained areas. Additionally, the use of Grad-CAM improves the interpretability of the model, offering insightful information regarding its decision-making process. Owing to its high discriminative ability, this model can be a reliable option for accurate brain tumor classification.