{Gaetano Settembre Grazia Gargano Serena Grazia De Benedictis}

Abstract

The advent of artificial intelligence in medical imaging has paved the way for significant advancements in the diagnosis of brain tumors. This study presents a novel ensemble approach that uses magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to identify and categorize common brain cancers, such as pituitary, meningioma, and glioma. The proposed workflow is composed of a two-fold approach: firstly, it employs non-trivial image enhancement techniques in data preprocessing, low-rank Tucker decomposition for dimensionality reduction, and machine learning (ML) classifiers to detect and predict the type of brain tumor. Secondly, persistent homology (PH), a topological data analysis (TDA) technique, is exploited to extract potential critical areas in MRI scans. When paired with the ML classifier output, this additional information can help domain experts to identify areas of interest that might contain tumor signatures, improving the interpretability of ML predictions. When compared to automated diagnoses, this transparency adds another level of confidence and is essential for clinical acceptance. The performance of the system was quantitatively evaluated on a well-known MRI dataset, with an overall classification accuracy of 97.28% using an extremely randomized trees model. The promising results show that the integration of TDA, ML, and low-rank approximation methods is a successful approach for brain tumor identification and categorization, providing a solid foundation for further study and clinical application.