Domain-Adaptive MRI Learning Model for Precision Diagnosis of CNS Tumors

Background: Diagnosing CNS tumors through MRI is limited by significant variability in scanner hardware, acquisition protocols, and intensity characteristics at clinical centers, resulting in substantial domain shifts that lead to diminished reliability for automated models. Methods: We present a Domain-Adaptive MRI Learning Model (DA-MLM) consisting of an adversarially aligned hybrid 3D CNN–transformer encoder with contrastive regularization and covariance-based feature harmonization. Varying sequence MRI inputs (T1, T1ce, T2, and FLAIR) were inputted to multi-scale convolutional layers followed by global self-attention to effectively capture localized tumor structure and long-range spatial context, with domain adaptation that harmonizes feature distribution across datasets. Results: On the BraTS 2020 dataset, we found DA-MLM achieved 94.8% accuracy, 93.6% macro-F1, and 96.2% AUC, improving upon previously established benchmarks by 2–4%. DA-MLM also attained Dice score segmentation of 93.1% (WT), 91.4% (TC), and 89.5% (ET), improving upon 2–3.5% for CNN and transformer methods. On the REMBRANDT dataset, DA-MLM achieved 92.3% accuracy with segmentation improvements of 3–7% over existing U-Net and expert annotations. Robustness testing indicated 40–60% less degradation under noise, contrast shift, and motion artifacts, and synthetic shifts in scanner location showed negligible performance impairment (