Brain Tumor Classification Using DINO Features and Lightweight Classifiers

The accurate detection and classification of brain tumors from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are critical for diagnosis and treatment planning. While deep learning has shown remarkable success in this domain, many state-of-the-art models rely on complex, end-to-end convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that require extensive computational resources and large, annotated datasets for training. This work proposes a novel and efficient methodology that, for the first time, leverages self-supervised DINO vision transformer backbones (DINO v1, DINOv2, and DINOv3) on a large corpus of natural images as powerful feature extractors for brain tumor analysis. We utilize the rich, general-purpose features from DINO-family backbones without fine-tuning the core model. These extracted features are then fed into a simpler, task-specific classifier (such as a support vector machine or a multi-layer perceptron) for the final detection and multi-class classification (e.g., glioma, meningioma, and pituitary tumor). Our methodology is evaluated on two benchmark medical imaging datasets with various classifying granularities. The results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves competitive and, in some cases, superior classification accuracy compared to representative fine-tuned convolutional neural networks and attention-based architectures, while significantly reducing the number of trainable parameters and training time. In particular, the best configuration achieves up to 98.17% accuracy and an F1-score of 98.18% on the 15-class dataset and 99.08% accuracy and an F1-score of 99.02% on the 4-class dataset. This study confirms the exceptional transfer learning capabilities of self-supervised vision transformers like DINO in the medical imaging domain, establishing it as a highly effective and efficient backbone for robust brain tumor detection and classification systems.