A successive framework for brain tumor interpretation using Yolo variants

Accurate identification and segmentation of brain tumors in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images are critical for timely diagnosis and treatment. MRI is frequently used to diagnose these disorders; however medical professionals find it challenging to manually evaluate MRI pictures because of time restrictions and unpredictability. Computerized methods such as R-CNN, attention models and earlier YOLO variants face limitations due to high computational demands and suboptimal segmentation performance. To overcome these limitations, this study proposes a successive framework that evaluates YOLOv9, YOLOv10, and YOLOv11 for tumor detection and segmentation using the Figshare Brain Tumor dataset (2100 images) and BraTS2020 dataset (3170 MRI slices). Preprocessing involves log transformation for intensity normalization, histogram equalization for contrast enhancement, and edge-based ROI extraction. The models were trained on 80% of the combined dataset and evaluated on the remaining 20%. YOLOv11 demonstrated superior performance, achieving 96.22% classification accuracy on BraTS2020 and 96.41% on Figshare, with an F1-score of 0.990, recall of 0.984, mAP@0.5 of 0.993, and mAP@ [0.5:0.95] of 0.801 during testing. With a fast inference time of 5.3 ms and a balanced precision-recall profile, YOLOv11 proves to be a robust, real-time solution for brain tumor detection in clinical applications.