As corona virus disease (COVID-19) is still an ongoing global outbreak, countries around the world continue to take precautions and measures to control the spread of the pandemic. Because of the excessive number of infected patients and the resulting deficiency of testing kits in hospitals, a rapid, reliable, and automatic detection of COVID-19 is in extreme need to curb the number of infections. By analyzing the COVID-19 chest X-ray images, a novel metaheuristic approach is proposed based on hybrid dipper throated and particle swarm optimizers. The lung region was segmented from the original chest X-ray images and augmented using various transformation operations. Furthermore, the augmented images were fed into the VGG19 deep network for feature extraction. On the other hand, a feature selection method is proposed to select the most significant features that can boost the classification results. Finally, the selected features were input into an optimized neural network for detection. The neural network is optimized using the proposed hybrid optimizer. The experimental results showed that the proposed method achieved 99.88% accuracy, outperforming the existing COVID-19 detection models. In addition, a deep statistical analysis is performed to study the performance and stability of the proposed optimizer. The results confirm the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach.

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is a deadly cancer characterized by aberrant accumulation of immature lymphocytes in the blood or bone marrow. Effective treatment of ALL is strongly associated with the early diagnosis of the disease. Current practice for initial ALL diagnosis is performed through manual evaluation of stained blood smear microscopy images, which is a time-consuming and error-prone process. Deep learning-based human-centric biomedical diagnosis has recently emerged as a powerful tool for assisting physicians in making medical decisions. Therefore, numerous computer-aided diagnostic systems have been developed to autonomously identify ALL in blood images. In this study, a new Bayesian-based optimized convolutional neural network (CNN) is introduced for the detection of ALL in microscopic smear images. To promote classification performance, the architecture of the proposed CNN and its hyperparameters are customized to input data through the Bayesian optimization approach. The Bayesian optimization technique adopts an informed iterative procedure to search the hyperparameter space for the optimal set of network hyperparameters that minimizes an objective error function. The proposed CNN is trained and validated using a hybrid dataset which is formed by integrating two public ALL datasets. Data augmentation has been adopted to further supplement the hybrid image set to boost classification performance. The Bayesian search-derived optimal CNN model recorded an improved performance of image-based ALL classification on test set. The findings of this study reveal the superiority of the proposed Bayesian-optimized CNN over other optimized deep learning ALL classification models.

One of the most promising research areas in the healthcare industry and the scientific community is focusing on the AI-based applications for real medical challenges such as the building of computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems for breast cancer. Transfer learning is one of the recent emerging AI-based techniques that allow rapid learning progress and improve medical imaging diagnosis performance. Although deep learning classification for breast cancer has been widely covered, certain obstacles still remain to investigate the independency among the extracted high-level deep features. This work tackles two challenges that still exist when designing effective CAD systems for breast lesion classification from mammograms. The first challenge is to enrich the input information of the deep learning models by generating pseudo-colored images instead of only using the input original grayscale images. To achieve this goal two different image preprocessing techniques are parallel used: contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) and Pixel-wise intensity adjustment. The original image is preserved in the first channel, while the other two channels receive the processed images, respectively. The generated three-channel pseudo-colored images are fed directly into the input layer of the backbone CNNs to generate more powerful high-level deep features. The second challenge is to overcome the multicollinearity problem that occurs among the high correlated deep features generated from deep learning models. A new hybrid processing technique based on Logistic Regression (LR) as well as Principal Components Analysis (PCA) is presented and called LR-PCA. Such a process helps to select the significant principal components (PCs) to further use them for the classification purpose. The proposed CAD system has been examined using two different public benchmark datasets which are INbreast and mini-MAIS. The proposed CAD system could achieve the highest performance accuracies of 98.60% and 98.80% using INbreast and mini-MAIS datasets, respectively. Such a CAD system seems to be useful and reliable for breast cancer diagnosis.

Brain tumors (BTs) are deadly diseases that can strike people of every age, all over the world. Every year, thousands of people die of brain tumors. Brain-related diagnoses require caution, and even the smallest error in diagnosis can have negative repercussions. Medical errors in brain tumor diagnosis are common and frequently result in higher patient mortality rates. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is widely used for tumor evaluation and detection. However, MRI generates large amounts of data, making manual segmentation difficult and laborious work, limiting the use of accurate measurements in clinical practice. As a result, automated and dependable segmentation methods are required. Automatic segmentation and early detection of brain tumors are difficult tasks in computer vision due to their high spatial and structural variability. Therefore, early diagnosis or detection and treatment are critical. Various traditional Machine learning (ML) techniques have been used to detect various types of brain tumors. The main issue with these models is that the features were manually extracted. To address the aforementioned insightful issues, this paper presents a hybrid deep transfer learning (GN-AlexNet) model of BT tri-classification (pituitary, meningioma, and glioma). The proposed model combines GoogleNet architecture with the AlexNet model by removing the five layers of GoogleNet and adding ten layers of the AlexNet model, which extracts features and classifies them automatically. On the same CE-MRI dataset, the proposed model was compared to transfer learning techniques (VGG-16, AlexNet, SqeezNet, ResNet, and MobileNet-V2) and ML/DL. The proposed model outperformed the current methods in terms of accuracy and sensitivity (accuracy of 99.51% and sensitivity of 98.90%).

With the help of machine learning, many of the problems that have plagued mammography in the past have been solved. Effective prediction models need many normal and tumor samples. For medical applications such as breast cancer diagnosis framework, it is difficult to gather labeled training data and construct effective learning frameworks. Transfer learning is an emerging strategy that has recently been used to tackle the scarcity of medical data by transferring pre-trained convolutional network knowledge into the medical domain. Despite the well reputation of the transfer learning based on the pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for medical imaging, several hurdles still exist to achieve a prominent breast cancer classification performance. In this paper, we attempt to solve the Feature Dimensionality Curse (FDC) problem of the deep features that are derived from the transfer learning pre-trained CNNs. Such a problem is raised due to the high space dimensionality of the extracted deep features with respect to the small size of the available medical data samples. Therefore, a novel deep learning cascaded feature selection framework is proposed based on the pre-trained deep convolutional networks as well as the univariate-based paradigm. Deep learning models of AlexNet, VGG, and GoogleNet are randomly selected and used to extract the shallow and deep features from the INbreast mammograms, whereas the univariate strategy helps to overcome the dimensionality curse and multicollinearity issues for the extracted features. The optimized key features via the univariate approach are statistically significant (p-value ≤ 0.05) and have good capability to efficiently train the classification models. Using such optimal features, the proposed framework could achieve a promising evaluation performance in terms of 98.50% accuracy, 98.06% sensitivity, 98.99% specificity, and 98.98% precision. Such performance seems to be beneficial to develop a practical and reliable computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) framework for breast cancer classification.

Diabetic Maculopathy (DM) is considered the most common cause of permanent visual impairment in diabetic patients. The absence of clear pathological symptoms of DM hinders the timely diagnosis and treatment of such a critical condition. Early diagnosis of DM is feasible through eye screening technologies. However, manual inspection of retinography images by eye specialists is a time-consuming routine. Therefore, many deep learning-based computer-aided diagnosis systems have been recently developed for the automatic prognosis of DM in retinal images. Manual tuning of deep learning network’s hyperparameters is a common practice in the literature. However, hyperparameter optimization has shown to be promising in improving the performance of deep learning networks in classifying several diseases. This study investigates the impact of using the Bayesian optimization (BO) algorithm on the classification performance of deep learning networks in detecting DM in retinal images. In this research, we propose two new custom Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models to detect DM in two distinct types of retinal photography; Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) and fundus retinography datasets. The Bayesian optimization approach is utilized to determine the optimal architectures of the proposed CNNs and optimize their hyperparameters. The findings of this study reveal the effectiveness of using the Bayesian optimization for fine-tuning the model hyperparameters in improving the performance of the proposed CNNs for the classification of diabetic maculopathy in fundus and OCT images. The pre-trained CNN models of AlexNet, VGG16Net, VGG 19Net, GoogleNet, and ResNet-50 are employed to be compared with the proposed CNN-based models. Statistical analyses, based on a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) test, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, and histogram, are performed to confirm the performance of the proposed models.