Advancing brain tumor detection: harnessing the Swin Transformer's power for accurate classification and performance analysis

PeerJ Comput Sci. 2024 Feb 29:10:e1867. doi: 10.7717/peerj-cs.1867. eCollection 2024.

Abstract

The accurate detection of brain tumors through medical imaging is paramount for precise diagnoses and effective treatment strategies. In this study, we introduce an innovative and robust methodology that capitalizes on the transformative potential of the Swin Transformer architecture for meticulous brain tumor image classification. Our approach handles the classification of brain tumors across four distinct categories: glioma, meningioma, non-tumor, and pituitary, leveraging a dataset comprising 2,870 images. Employing the Swin Transformer architecture, our method intricately integrates a multifaceted pipeline encompassing sophisticated preprocessing, intricate feature extraction mechanisms, and a highly nuanced classification framework. Utilizing 21 matrices for performance evaluation across all four classes, these matrices provide a detailed insight into the model's behavior throughout the learning process, furthermore showcasing a graphical representation of confusion matrix, training and validation loss and accuracy. The standout performance parameter, accuracy, stands at an impressive 97%. This achievement outperforms established models like CNN, DCNN, ViT, and their variants in brain tumor classification. Our methodology's robustness and exceptional accuracy showcase its potential as a pioneering model in this domain, promising substantial advancements in accurate tumor identification and classification, thereby contributing significantly to the landscape of medical image analysis.

Keywords: Brain; Computational intelligence; Digital health care; Medical image analysis; Swin transformer; Transformer; Tumor; Vision transformer.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Deanship of Scientific Research, Najran University, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia under the Distinguished Research funding program grant code number (NU/DRP/MRC/12/28). The funders are involved in study design, problem formulation, conceptualization, analysis, paper writeup and decision to publish the article.