X-SCSANet: Explainable Stack Convolutional Self-Attention Network for Brain Tumor Classification

Abstract

Brain tumors are devastating and shorten the patient’s life. It has an impact on the physical, psychological, and financial well-being of both patients and family members. Early diagnosis and treatment can reduce patients’ chances of survival. Detecting and diagnosing brain cancers using MRI scans is time-consuming and requires expertise in that domain. Nowadays, instead of traditional approaches to brain tumor analysis, several deep learning models are used to assist professionals and mitigate time. This paper introduces a stack convolutional self-attention network that extracts important local and global features from a freely available MRI scan dataset. Since the medical domain is one of the most sensitive fields, end-users should put their trust in the deep learning model before automating tumor classification. Therefore, the Grad-CAM method has been updated to better explain the model’s output. Combining local and global features improves brain tumor classification performance, with the suggested model reaching an accuracy of 96.44% on the relevant dataset. The proposed model’s precision, specificity, sensitivity, and F1-score are reported as 96.5%, 98.83%, 96.44%, and 96.4%, respectively. Furthermore, the layers’ insights are examined to acquire a deeper knowledge of the decision-making process.