Cross-Domain Transfer Learning for Brain Tumor Classification Under Limited MRI Data Regimes: A Fraction-Resolved Benchmark with Explicit Statistical and Methodological Caveats
This study demonstrates that ImageNet-pretrained EfficientNet-B0 significantly outperforms random initialization for four-class brain tumor MRI classification only under extreme data scarcity (5% of 5,600 images), while highlighting critical limitations such as potential patient-level data leakage and the lack of statistical significance for transfer learning benefits at larger data fractions, ultimately arguing against autonomous deployment without further rigorous validation.