Scores That Hold, Benchmarks That Leak: Measuring Dataset Contamination in Public Brain-Tumor MRI Classification

Bhanu Prakash Vangala, Sowmya Guda, Latha Peddi, Navya Vangala

Automated classification of brain tumors from MRI is a heavily published application of deep learning in medical imaging, with reported accuracies on public benchmarks routinely exceeding 98%. However, accuracy does not capture a critical dimension of benchmark quality: dataset integrity, defined as the independence of test from training data at the image, patient, and acquisition-source levels. We introduce a three-layer contamination framework comprising duplicate, patient, and source-label leakage to assess the public corpora on which this literature rests. We audit the three most widely used corpora against a chest-radiograph negative control and quantify each layer's effect on measured performance across nine architectures and three evaluation conditions. Contamination is severe at every layer: 28.8% of the dominant corpus's official test split has a near-twin in its own training split, a second corpus leaks 22.3% of its test images byte-identically, 95.5% of traceable test images share a patient with training, and file-header features containing no anatomy separate tumor from no-tumor at 0.959 balanced accuracy, at parity with fine-tuned ResNet backbones. The unexpected…