JCSIS
JCSIS

Multi-Modal Deep Learning Approach for Brain Tumor Classification Using MRI Images and Clinical Metadata.

Sam M. K.
Volume 5

Abstract

Brain tumors represent one of the most aggressive and life-threatening neurological malignancies, with accurate and timely classification being paramount for determining appropriate treatment strategies and improving patient prognosis. Conventional diagnostic approaches rely predominantly on radiologist interpretation of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans, a process that is inherently subjective, time-intensive, and highly dependent on clinical expertise. Existing deep learning models, while promising, largely exploit single-modality image data while neglecting the rich complementary diagnostic information embedded in structured clinical metadata — including patient demographics, tumor biomarkers, symptom onset duration, and histopathological reports. This paper proposes a novel Multi-Modal Deep Learning framework that synergistically fuses MRI-derived spatial features with structured clinical metadata to achieve robust and clinically meaningful brain tumor classification across four primary categories: Glioma, Meningioma, Pituitary Adenoma, and No Tumor. The imaging branch employs an ensemble of fine-tuned pre-trained CNN architectures — EfficientNet-B5, DenseNet-121, and Vision Transformer (ViT) — to extract hierarchical spatial and contextual features from multi-sequence MRI modalities (T1, T2, T1-contrast, and FLAIR). Simultaneously, the clinical metadata branch utilizes a fully connected neural network with attention mechanisms to encode structured patient-level features. The outputs of both branches are fused via a late-fusion cross-attention mechanism that learns to dynamically weight the contribution of each modality depending on input context. The integrated framework was trained and evaluated on the BraTS 2023 benchmark dataset augmented with clinical metadata records from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), comprising over 12,000 annotated multi-sequence MRI volumes. Extensive data augmentation, class balancing via ADASYN, and k-fold cross-validation strategies were employed to ensure robust generalization. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed multi-modal fusion framework achieves a classification accuracy of 98.3%, a macro-averaged F1-score of 0.981, a sensitivity of 97.6%, and an AUC-ROC of 0.994 — substantially outperforming single-modality CNN baselines and state-of-the-art methods including ResNet-50, VGG-19, and standard ViT models. Additionally, Grad-CAM++ and LIME-based explainability maps were generated to localize tumor regions and validate clinically relevant decision boundaries, bridging the gap between black-box deep learning predictions and radiological interpretability. The proposed framework establishes a scalable and generalizable pipeline for automated brain tumor diagnosis, with direct applicability to neuro-oncology clinical workflows and AI-assisted radiology platforms.

 


Keywords


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