A novel hybrid transformer-based framework (H-ConvNeXt-Swin) to classify brain tumors using MRI

This paper introduces a hybrid deep learning model combining ConvNeXt and Swin Transformer for classifying brain tumors from MRI scans. The ConvNeXt backbone is employed to obtain detailed local spatial features, whereas the Swin Transformer identifies hierarchical long-range dependencies, facilitating complementary feature representation. The proposed model is evaluated on a combined public MRI dataset of 7,023 images distributed across four categories: glioma, meningioma, pituitary, and no tumor. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed hybrid architecture outperforms several state-of-the-art convolutional and transformer-based models, achieving an accuracy of 95.37% with competitive precision and F-score. Additionally, qualitative explainability assessment using attention-based visualization techniques offers insight into the model's decision-making by highlighting diagnostically significant regions. Furthermore, we evaluate the proposed H-ConvNeXt-Swin model on the unified dataset and also report source-stratified performance on each of the three constituent datasets: Figshare, SARTAJ, and Br35H. Future work will focus on validating the proposed framework on multi-center clinical datasets and extending it to more complex tasks such as tumor localization and segmentation.