Swin–YOLOv12: A Hybrid Transformer-Based Deep Learning Approach for Enhanced Real-Time Brain Tumor Detection in MRI Images

Brain tumors (BTs) arise from the abnormal growth of cells within brain tissue and may spread rapidly, making them a major cause of mortality worldwide. Early detection of BTs remains highly challenging due to the brain’s complex structure and the heterogeneous nature of tumors. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) provides detailed information about tumor size, location, and shape, thereby supporting clinical decision-making for treatments such as chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgery. Traditional machine learning (ML) approaches mainly rely on manual feature extraction, whereas recent advances in Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) and deep learning (DL) have enabled more accurate detection of small and complex tumor regions. To improve automated tumor detection, we propose a hybrid Swin–YOLO framework that combines the Swin Transformer (ST) with the latest CNN-based YOLOv12 model. In this framework, the Swin Transformer serves as the main backbone for feature extraction, while the Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) and Path Aggregation Network (PANet) are employed in the neck to better capture multi-scale features. For training, we used the publicly available Br35H dataset and applied data augmentation to enhance the model’s robustness and generalization capability. The experimental results show that the proposed framework achieved 99.7% accuracy, 99.4% mAP@50, and 87.2% mAP@50:95. Furthermore, we incorporated Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques, including Grad-CAM and SHAP, to improve the interpretability of the model by visually highlighting the tumor regions that contributed most to the prediction. In addition, we developed NeuroVision AI, a web-based application designed to support faster and more accurate clinical decision-making. Although the proposed model demonstrated strong performance on the dataset, these results should be interpreted within the context of the current experimental setting.