Attention Deep Feature Extraction from Brain MRIs in Explainable Mode: DGXAINet

Abstract

Artificial intelligence models do not provide information about exactly how the predictions are reached. This lack of transparency is a major drawback. Particularly in medical applications, interest in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), which helps to develop methods of visualizing, explaining, and analyzing deep learning models, has increased recently. With explainable artificial intelligence, it is possible to understand whether the solutions offered by deep learning techniques are safe. This paper aims to diagnose a fatal disease such as a brain tumor faster and more accurately using XAI methods. In this study, we preferred datasets that are widely used in the literature, such as the four-class kaggle brain tumor dataset (Dataset I) and the three-class figshare brain tumor dataset (Dataset II). To extract features, a pre-trained deep learning model is chosen. DenseNet201 is used as the feature extractor in this case. The proposed automated brain tumor detection model includes five stages. First, training of brain MR images with DenseNet201, the tumor area was segmented with GradCAM. The features were extracted from DenseNet201 trained using the exemplar method. Extracted features were selected with iterative neighborhood component (INCA) feature selector. Finally, the selected features were classified using support vector machine (SVM) with 10-fold cross-validation. An accuracy of 98.65% and 99.97%, were obtained for Datasets I and II, respectively. The proposed model obtained higher performance than the state-of-the-art methods and can be used to aid radiologists in their diagnosis.