AI-Enhanced Virtual Biopsies for Brain Tumor Diagnosis in Low Resource Settings

Abstract

Timely brain tumor diagnosis remains challenging in low-resource clinical environments where expert neuroradiology interpretation, high-end MRI hardware, and invasive biopsy procedures may be limited. Although deep learning has achieved strong performance in brain tumor analysis, real-world adoption is constrained by computational demands, dataset shift across scanners, and limited interpretability. This paper presents a prototype virtual biopsy pipeline for four-class classification of 2D brain MRI images using a lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) and complementary radiomics-style handcrafted features. A MobileNetV2-based CNN is trained for classification, while an interpretable radiomics branch extracts eight features capturing lesion shape, intensity statistics, and gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) texture descriptors. A late fusion strategy concatenates CNN embeddings with radiomics features and trains a RandomForest classifier on the fused representation. Explainability is provided via Grad-CAM visualizations and radiomics feature importance analysis. Experiments on a public Kaggle brain tumor MRI dataset show improved validation performance for fusion relative to single-branch baselines, while robustness tests under reduced resolution and additive noise highlight sensitivity relevant to low-resource imaging conditions. The system is framed as decision support and not a substitute for clinical diagnosis or histopathology.