Akari Matsushima

Background/Objectives: Accurate classification of brain tumors is critical for treatment planning and prognosis. While deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown promise in medical imaging, few studies have systematically compared multiple architectures or integrated ensemble strategies to improve diagnostic performance. This study aimed to evaluate various CNN models and optimize classification performance using a majority voting ensemble approach on T1-weighted MRI brain images. Methods: Seven pretrained CNN architectures were fine-tuned to classify four categories: glioblastoma, meningioma, pituitary adenoma, and no tumor. Each model was trained using two optimizers (SGDM and ADAM) and evaluated on a public dataset split into training (70%), validation (10%), and testing (20%) subsets, and further validated on an independent external dataset to assess generalizability. A majority voting ensemble was constructed by aggregating predictions from all 14 trained models. Performance was assessed using accuracy, Kappa coefficient, true positive rate, precision, confusion matrix, and ROC curves. Results: Among individual models, GoogLeNet and Inception-v3 with ADAM achieved the highest classification accuracy (0.987). However, the ensemble approach outperformed all standalone models, achieving an accuracy of 0.998, a Kappa coefficient of 0.997, and AUC values above 0.997 for all tumor classes. The ensemble demonstrated improved sensitivity, precision, and overall robustness. Conclusions: The majority voting ensemble of diverse CNN architectures significantly enhanced the performance of MRI-based brain tumor classification, surpassing that of any single model. These findings underscore the value of model diversity and ensemble learning in building reliable AI-driven diagnostic tools for neuro-oncology.

Background/Objectives: Accurate classification of brain tumors is critical for treatment planning and prognosis. While deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown promise in medical imaging, few studies have systematically compared multiple architectures or integrated ensemble strategies to improve diagnostic performance. This study aimed to evaluate various CNN models and optimize classification performance using a majority voting ensemble approach on T1-weighted MRI brain images. Methods: Seven pretrained CNN architectures—ResNet-18, ResNet-50, ResNet-101, GoogLeNet, MobileNet-v2, EfficientNet-b0, and Inception-v3—were fine-tuned to classify four brain tumor categories: glioma, meningioma, pituitary tumor, and no tumor. Each model was trained using two optimizers (SGDM and ADAM) and evaluated on a public dataset split into training (70%), validation (10%), and testing (20%) subsets. A majority voting ensemble was constructed by aggregating predictions from all 14 trained models. Performance was assessed using accuracy, Kappa coefficient, true positive rate, precision, confusion matrix, and ROC curves. Results: Among individual models, GoogLeNet and Inception-v3 with ADAM achieved the highest classification accuracy (0.987). However, the ensemble approach outperformed all standalone models, achieving an accuracy of 0.998, a Kappa coefficient of 0.997, and AUC values above 0.997 for all tumor classes. The ensemble demonstrated improved sensitivity, precision, and overall robustness. Conclusions: The majority voting ensemble of diverse CNN architectures significantly enhanced the performance of MRI-based brain tumor classification, surpassing that of any single model. These findings underscore the value of model diversity and ensemble learning in building reliable AI-driven diagnostic tools for neuro-oncology.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown promise in accurately diagnosing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and bacterial pneumonia using chest X-ray images. However, determining the optimal feature extraction approach is challenging. This study investigates the use of fusion-extracted features by deep networks to improve the accuracy of COVID-19 and bacterial pneumonia classification with chest X-ray radiography. A Fusion CNN method was developed using five different deep learning models after transferred learning to extract image features (Fusion CNN). The combined features were used to build a support vector machine (SVM) classifier with a RBF kernel. The performance of the model was evaluated using accuracy, Kappa values, recall rate, and precision scores. The Fusion CNN model achieved an accuracy and Kappa value of 0.994 and 0.991, with precision scores for normal, COVID-19, and bacterial groups of 0.991, 0.998, and 0.994, respectively. The results indicate that the Fusion CNN models with the SVM classifier provided reliable and accurate classification performance, with Kappa values no less than 0.990. Using a Fusion CNN approach could be a possible solution to enhance accuracy further. Therefore, the study demonstrates the potential of deep learning and fusion-extracted features for accurate COVID-19 and bacterial pneumonia classification with chest X-ray radiography.