Retrospection dropout bare-bones particle swarm optimization for feature-based brain tumor classification in MRI images

Brain cancer remains a critical global health challenge, where early and accurate diagnosis remains a critical challenge in clinical practice. Current supervised learning methods for tumor classification face substantial limitations due to their dependence on large labeled datasets requiring costly pixel-level annotations, susceptibility to annotation biases, and poor generalization across diverse populations. To address these challenges, this paper proposes Retrospection Dropout Bare-Bones Particle Swarm Optimization (RDBPSO), a novel feature-based classification framework that requires only image-level class labels without the need for pixel-level annotation or manual segmentation masks. The proposed RDBPSO introduces two key innovations: (1) a retrospection mechanism that maintains dual-layer memory structures (optimal and sub-optimal solutions) to enhance particle diversity and prevent premature convergence, and (2) a dropout strategy that reduces computational complexity through intelligent particle interaction sampling. Extensive experiments on an 800-image brain MRI dataset demonstrate RDBPSO’s superior performance. The proposed method achieves 90.12% classification accuracy, outperforming standard PSO (89.25%), GMM (77.50%), and K-means (72.75%), while delivering robust clustering quality with an ARI of 0.6436, NMI of 0.5511, and FMI of 0.8229. These results demonstrate the algorithmic promise of RDBPSO as an annotation-efficient framework for brain tumor MRI classification, warranting further investigation on more diverse and clinically representative datasets.