IRO Journals
Journal of Soft Computing Paradigm

An Explainable MRI-based Brain Tumor Diagnosis Framework with Grad-CAM Visualization

Open Access
Published: 07 July, 2026
Pages: 239-252
  • Mouthika G. , Mouthika G.
    Student, Department of Computer Science and Medical Engineering (Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics), Sri Ramachandra Faculty of Engineering and Technology, SRIHER, Chennai, India
    Student, Department of Computer Science and Medical Engineering (Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics), Sri Ramachandra Faculty of Engineering and Technology, SRIHER, Chennai, India
  • Hariganesh V. , Hariganesh V.
    Student, Department of Computer Science and Medical Engineering (Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics), Sri Ramachandra Faculty of Engineering and Technology, SRIHER, Chennai, India
    Student, Department of Computer Science and Medical Engineering (Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics), Sri Ramachandra Faculty of Engineering and Technology, SRIHER, Chennai, India
  • Ganesh Srinivasan , Ganesh Srinivasan
    Student, Department of Computer Science and Medical Engineering (Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics), Sri Ramachandra Faculty of Engineering and Technology, SRIHER, Chennai, India
    Student, Department of Computer Science and Medical Engineering (Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics), Sri Ramachandra Faculty of Engineering and Technology, SRIHER, Chennai, India
  • Ashika Sharon L. , Ashika Sharon L.
    Student, Department of Computer Science and Medical Engineering (Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics), Sri Ramachandra Faculty of Engineering and Technology, SRIHER, Chennai, India
    Student, Department of Computer Science and Medical Engineering (Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics), Sri Ramachandra Faculty of Engineering and Technology, SRIHER, Chennai, India
  • Jayanthy A.K. Jayanthy A.K.
    Professor-Research, Centre for Excellence, Rajalakshmi Engineering College, Chennai, India
    Professor-Research, Centre for Excellence, Rajalakshmi Engineering College, Chennai, India
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How to Cite

G., Mouthika, Hariganesh V., Ganesh Srinivasan, Ashika Sharon L., and Jayanthy A.K. 2026. “An Explainable MRI-Based Brain Tumor Diagnosis Framework With Grad-CAM Visualization”. Journal of Soft Computing Paradigm 8 (3): 239-52. https://doi.org/10.36548/jscp.2026.3.004.
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Keywords

Brain Tumor Detection
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)
Deep Learning
VGG16
Transfer Learning
Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)
Grad-CAM

Abstract

This research work presents an explainable deep learning approach to automatically detect, classify, localize, and estimate the severity of the brain tumors using MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) images. It involves a VGG16-based transfer learning model with a two-stage approach of classification including first binary tumor detection and then multiclass classification of tumors. Preprocessing and data augmentation of brain MRI images is carried out before classification. Grad-CAM is applied to the proposed approach to visualize the activation map highlighting the most relevant areas of the image used by the classifier. The activation maps can be further used to approximate the localization and pixel-based severity estimation of the tumor. The experiments were conducted using a publicly available MRI dataset, and 97.56% accuracy for the binary classification and 90.38% for the multiclass classification were achieved.

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